Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/228

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224
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

hyphenated word was moved to the previous page because of the intervening image.— Ineuw talk 04:23, 22 September 2013 (UTC) (Wikisource contributor note)

Puget Sound Marine Station, at Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, Washington.

laboratory. This salmon-cannery hamlet of a few hundred people situated on the eastern side of the large, partly agricultural San Juan island, is distant from Seattle about four or five hours' run for the small steamers which constitute the transportation system of the islands of the Sound. That the natural conditions of this location are good for the kind of work which the laboratory aims to do, there can be no doubt. The distance from the mainland ports is something of an inconvenience, but the isolation would seem to be a perpetual security against contamination of the water by a large city and much shipping; and this is a consideration of great importance for such a laboratory.

For a number of years the station went through the experience familiar to such undertakings, that of playing cuckoo so far as housing is concerned. In this instance the alien home was an abandoned salmon cannery.

But the persistence and enthusiasm of Professor Kincaid and his colleagues finally bore fruit to the extent of a four-acre piece of land, the gift of Captain Newhall, of Friday Harbor, as a permanent site; a new laboratory building about seventy-five by thirty feet in floor area, two stories high; a mess house about forty feet square; and forty-five platform tents for living quarters. The buildings were provided by the University of Washington on money appropriated by the state legislature. The laboratory proper situated at the very water's edge, indeed, partly over the water on piles, is at the foot of a beautiful wooded bank that reaches up one hundred feet or more at an angle of full forty-five degrees from the back door of the building. The first floor of the laboratory is mostly one large room in which are the salt-water aquaria and facilities for experimental work of various sorts. On the second floor are nine private workrooms and a large room thirty