Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/404

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400
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Fig. 3. Cocoanut Grove near the Tortugas Laboratory.

mainly upon a rich and varied fauna, but upon the presence of animals which may be found in abundance in its immediate neighborhood, and which provide favorable subjects for experimental studies.

When we contemplate the vast numbers of so-called researches published every year, it becomes evident that science will be advanced more surely by improving the quality of these papers than by increasing their bulk. For a generation the civilized nations of the world have at great expense maintained experiment stations to improve the breed of plants and animals useful to man, but nearly all of them have labored under the false impression that researches can be produced at stated intervals. Much of that freedom so essential for research was sacrificed to the production of bulky annual reports restricted to the accounts of "purely practical" studies. It was not an accident that Mendel, laboring obscurely in his cloister garden and with no thought save but for nature and her ways, discovered the law of heredity which all the experiment stations in the world failed to find.

Anton Dohrn did well for science when he gave his fortune to build the Naples Laboratory, but he did far better when he granted to those who labored there unlimited time and boundless freedom in thought and action, and his confidence was rewarded, for at Naples have been produced many of the greatest papers known to biological science.

Concentrating its efforts solely upon research, the Tortugas is in no sense the rival of other educational institutions, its simple object being to supplement and extend the work which others are attempting,