Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/229

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BIOLOGICAL LABORATORIES
225

feet by thirty feet which is used for various laboratory and other purposes. Besides the work space in the laboratory building a laboratory for botanical study has been fitted up in the basement of the commons building.

The station owns a fleet of a dozen row boats, but as yet no power boat, dependence been placed so far on hired boats for the heavier bottom collecting.

This station stands alone among its kind on the Pacific coast in aiming to be intercollegiate in constitution and maintenance. While, as already indicated, the "plant" has been furnished by the state, and is owned by the university; and while the state is at present supplying nearly all the maintenance funds, about $3,000 a year, a system of cooperating institutions is nevertheless being worked out. At present the Universities of Kansas and Oregon and the Washington State Normal School at Billingham are, I believe, the only institutions in the partnership, but the plan is being earnestly pushed and other schools and colleges, notably Reed College of Portland, Oregon, seem likely to enter.

So far the laboratory has not aimed at much beyond formal instruction and general information-getting on the part of those who assemble there; and sessions have been restricted to a few weeks in the summer. The session of 1913 saw an attendance of about one hundred teachers and students, these being drawn from a wide area of the northwestern United States. This considerable number may be taken to indicate the reality of the demand for opportunity for this kind of study in this region. No doubt this demand will increase and will soon expand to include advanced specialized studies and genuine investigation as well as elementary instruction and general information. Since the beginning of the session of 1914 Professor T. C. Frye, of the department of botany of the University of Washington, has been director of the station, Professor Kincaid having turned his interest and efforts in other directions.

Traveling down the coast from Puget Sound to central California, one finds the Timothy Hopkins laboratory at Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay belonging to the Leland Stanford Junior University. This is the pioneer among the marine laboratories on the Pacific coast, its life being practically coexistent with that of the university of which it is a part. It began its work in 1893, only about a year after the university opened its doors. It is also the most commodiously housed of the western stations, and, in keeping with its greater age and size, has furnished facilities to more biologists than any of the other Pacific coast laboratories.

About eighty students can be accommodated in the station's two buildings. There are four general laboratories, one lecture room, and