A History of Science — Volume 5

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

The eels attract their full share of attention from the visitors, but there is one family of creatures which easily holds the palm over all the others in this regard. These are the various representatives of the great cult of squids and cuttle-fishes. The cuttle-fish proper—who, of course, is no fish at all—is shaped strangely like a diminutive elephant, with a filmy, waving membrane along its sides in lieu of legs. Like the other members of his clan, he can change his color variously. Sometimes he is of a dull brown, again prettily mottled; then, with almost kaleidoscopic suddenness, he will assume a garb beautifully striped in black and white, rivalled by nothing but the coat of the zebra. The cuttle-fish is a sluggish creature, seeking out the darker corners of his grotto, and often lying motionless for long periods together. But not so the little squid. He does not thrive in captivity, and incessantly wings his way back and forth, with slow, wavy flappings of his filmy appendages, until he wears himself out and dies unreconciled.

In marked contrast with both cuttle-fish and squid is their cousin the octopus—a creepy, crawly creature, like eight serpents in one—at once the oddest and the most fascinating creature in the entire aquarium. You will find a crowd almost always before his grotto watching his curious antics. Usually slow and deliberate in movement, he yet has capacity for a certain agility. Now and again he dives off suddenly, head first, through the water, with the directness if not quite with the speed of an arrow. A moment later, tired of his flight, he sprawls his eight webbed legs out in every direction, breaking them seemingly into a thousand joints, and settles back like an animated parachute awreck. Then perchance he perches on a rock knowingly, with the appearance of owl-like wisdom, albeit his head looks surprisingly like a frog's. Anon he holds his head erect and stretches out his long arms in what is most palpably a yawn. Then, for pure diversion, he may hold himself half erect on his umbrella frame of legs and sidle along a sort of quadrille—a veritable "eight hands in round."

But all the while he conveys distinctly the impression of a creature to the last degree blasé. Even when a crab is let down into his grotto by an attendant for the edification of the visitors the octopus seems to regard it with only lukewarm interest. If he deigns to go in pursuit, it is with the air of one who says, "Anything to oblige," rather than of eagerness for a morsel of food. Yet withal, even though unhurried, he usually falls upon the victim with surprising sureness of aim, encompassing it in his multiform net. Or perhaps, thinking the game hardly worth so much effort, he merely reaches out suddenly with one of his eight arms—each of which is a long-drawn-out hand as well—and grasps the victim and conveys it to his distensible maw without so much as changing his attitude.

All this of the giant octopus—brown and warty and wrinkled and blasé. But the diminutive cousin in the grotto with the jellyfishes is a bird of quite another feather. Physically he is constructed on the same model as the other, but his mentality is utterly opposed. No grand rôles for him; his part is comedy. He finds life full of interest. He is satisfied with himself and with the world. He assumes an aspect of positive rakishness, and intelligence, so to say, beams from his every limb. All day long he must be up and doing. For want of better business he will pursue a shrimp for hours at a time with the zest of a true sportsman. Now he darts after his intended prey like a fox-hound. Again he resorts to finesse, and sidles off, with eyes fixed in another direction, like a master of stratagem. To be sure, he never catches the shrimp—but what of that? The true sportsman is far removed from the necessity for mere material profit. I half suspect that little octopus would release the shrimp if once he caught him, as the true fisherman throws back the excess of his catch. It is sport, not game, that he covets.

THE LABORATORY AND ITS FOUNDER

When one has made the circuit of the aquarium he will have seen and marvelled at some hundreds of curious creatures utterly unlike anything to be found above water. Brightly colored starfishes, beautiful sea-urchins, strange stationary ascidians, and flower-like sea-anemones, quaint sea-horses, and filmy, fragile jellyfishes and their multiform kin—all seem novel and wonderful as one sees them in their native element. Things that appear to be parts of the rocky or sandy bed of the grottos startle one by moving about, and thus discovering themselves as living creatures, simulating their environment for purposes of protection. Or perhaps what seems to be a giant snail suddenly unfurls wings from its seeming shell, and goes waving through the water, to the utter bewilderment of the beholder. Such freaks as this are quite the rule among the strange tribes of the deep, for the crowding of population there makes the struggle for existence keen, and necessitates all manner of subterfuges for the preservation of species.

Each and every one of the thirty-odd grottos will repay long observation, even on the part of the most casual visitor, and when one has seen them all, he will know more at first hand of the method of life of the creatures of the sea than all the books could teach him. He will depart fully satisfied, and probably, if he be the usual sight-seer, he will never suspect that what he has seen is really but an incidental part of the institution whose building he has entered. Even though he note casually the inscription "Stazione Zoôlogica" above the entrance, he may never suspect that the aquarium he has just visited is only an adjunct—the popular exhibit, so to speak—of the famous institution of technical science known to the English-speaking world as the Marine Biological Laboratory at Naples. Yet such is the fact. The aquarium seems worthy enough to exist by and for itself. It is a great popular educator as well as amuser, yet its importance is utterly insignificant compared with the technical features of the institution of which it is an adjunct.

This technical department, the biological laboratory proper, has its local habitation in the parts of the building not occupied by the aquarium—parts of which the general public, as a rule, sees nothing. There is, indeed, little to see that would greatly interest the casual inspector, for in its outward aspects one laboratory is much like another, a seeming hodgepodge of water-tanks, glass jars of specimens, and tables for microscopes. The real status of a laboratory is not determined by the equipment.

And yet it will not do to press this assertion too far, for in one sense it is the equipment of 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.