Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/230

226 seventeen private laboratories for investigators. The buildings, of wood, are both two stories high, well lighted and amply supplied with running water, both salt and fresh. According to the directors, about seventy-five investigators have made use of the laboratory since its foundation and something like six hundred and fifty students of various grades have received instruction. Regular class instruction is given each summer by university professors from the departments of zoology, botany and physiology. Although the buildings are not formally open during the rest of the year, investigators are usually able by special arrangement to get the use of the laboratories at almost any time.

The laboratory was a gift of Timothy Hopkins, of Menlo Park, Calif., but is dependent on the university for maintenance funds, library, and equipment. Students who receive class instruction pay fees, the money derived from this source being applied to the running expenses of the institution.

Professors C. H. Gilbert and O. P. Jenkins, of the departments of zoology and physiology, respectively, have been from the beginning joint directors of the laboratory, but the courses of instruction have been mostly given in later years by the younger men of the university. Professors Harold Heath, P. M. McFarland and W. B. Price having been especially faithful and effaçaient in this capacity.

Pacific Grove is an exceedingly advantageous location for a marine station, particularly one with the aims which the Hopkins laboratory set for itself; namely, those of providing facilities for investigations on littoral animals and plants and those inhabiting the bottom in relatively shallow waters; and of giving instruction to elementary students.

So far as the writer's somewhat extensive observations on the Pacific littoral of North America has gone, no other point on the whole coast, with the possible exception of Yakutat Bay in southeastern Alaska, has a rocky shore fauna and flora of greater luxuriance, whether as to individuals or species, than has the southern shore of Monterey Bay. This richness of life, taken along with the accessibility of the locality from a populous center, and the all-year-round congeniality of the climate, has made the Hopkins laboratory an important factor in the promotion of biological science in this part of the country. It is greatly to be hoped that at no distant day the laboratory will become possessed of sufficient funds to enable it to be fully prepared to receive investigators and students at any time of the year, and not be obliged to restrict its activities so largely to the summer months.

The Herzstein laboratory, also at Pacific Grove, is quite different in aim and scope of activities from the Hopkins. It was a gift to the department of physiology of the University of California by Dr. Morris Herzstein, of San Francisco, the primary purpose of which was to provide a sea-side working place where Professor Jacques Loeb could prosecute certain of his investigations.