The subjects attacked in the marine laboratory first and last are practically coextensive with the range of general biology, bacteriology excepted. Naturally enough, the life histories of marine forms of animals and plants have come in for a full share of attention. But, as I have already intimated, this zoological work forms only a small part of the investigations undertaken here, for in the main the workers prefer to attack those general biological problems which in their broader outlines apply to all forms of living beings, from highest to lowest. For example, Dr. Driesch, the well-known Leipzig biologist, spends several months of each year at the laboratory, and has made here most of those studies of cell activities with which his name is associated. The past season he has studied an interesting and important problem of heredity, endeavoring to ascertain the respective shares of the male and female parents in the development of the offspring. The subjects of his experiments have been various species of sea-urchins, but the principles discovered will doubtless be found to apply to most, or perhaps all, forms of vertebrate life as well.
While these studies were under way another developmental problem was being attacked in a neighboring room of the laboratory by Professor Kitasato, of the University of Tokio, Japan. The subjects this time were the embryos of certain fishes, and the investigation had to do with the development of instructive monstrosities through carefully designed series of injuries inflicted upon the embryo at various stages of its development. Meantime another stage of the developmental history of organic things--this time a microscopical detail regarding the cell divisions of certain plants--has been studied by Professor Mottier, of Indiana; while another American botanist, Professor Swingle, of the Smithsonian Institution, has been going so far afield from marine subjects as to investigate the very practical subject of the fertilization of figs as practised by the agriculturists about Naples.
Even from these few citations it will appear how varied are the lines of attack of a single biological problem; for here we see, at the hands of a few workers, a great variety of forms of life--radiates, insects, vertebrates, low marine plants and high terrestrial ones--made to contribute to the elucidation of various phases of one general topic, the all-important subject of heredity. All these studies are conducted in absolute independence, and to casual inspection they might seem to have little affinity with one another; yet in reality they all trench upon the same territory, and each in its own way tends to throw light upon a topic which, in some of its phases, is of the utmost practical importance to the human family. It is a long vault from the embryo of an obscure sea-weed to the well-being of man, yet it may well happen--so wide in their application are the general life principles--that study of the one may point a practical moral for the other.