the Naples laboratory that has made it what it
is. Not, however, the equipment in the sense of microscopes and other
working paraphernalia. These, of course, are the best of their kind, but
machinery alone does not make a great institution, any more than
clothes make the man. The all-essential and distinctive equipment of
the laboratory reveals itself in its personnel. In the present case, as
always in a truly great institution of any kind, there is one dominating
personality, one moving spirit. This is Dr. Anton Dohrn, founder of the
laboratory, and still its controller and director, in name and in fact.

More than twenty-five years ago Dr. Dohrn, then a young man fresh from
the universities of his native Germany, discovered what he felt to be
a real need in the biological world. He was struck with the fact that
nowhere in the world could be found an establishment affording good
opportunities for the study of marine life. Water covers three-fifths of
the earth's surface, as everybody knows, and everywhere this water teems
with life, so that a vast preponderance of the living things of the
globe find their habitat there. Yet the student who might desire to make
special studies of this life would find himself balked at the threshold
for want of opportunity.

It was no great thing to discover this paucity, which, indeed, fairly
beckoned the discoverer. The great thing was to supply the deficiency,
and this was what Dr. Dohrn determined to do. He selected Naples as the
best location for the laboratory he proposed to found, because of its
climate and its location beside the teeming waters of the Mediterranean.
He organized a laboratory; he called about him a corps of able
assistants; he made the Marine Biological Laboratory at Naples famous,
the Mecca of all biological eyes throughout the world. It was not all
done in a day. It was far enough from being done without opposition and
discouragement; but these are matters of history which Dr. Dohrn now
prefers not to dwell upon. Suffice it that the result aimed at was
finally achieved, and in far greater measure than could at first be
hoped for.

And from that day till this Naples has been the centre of that branch
of biological inquiry which has for its object the investigation of
problems best studied with material gathered from the sea. And this,
let me hasten to add, includes far more than a mere study of the life
histories of marine animals and plants as such. It include