A need was soon felt for a marine laboratory along broader lines, and one available to the students and teachers of the schools and colleges. To meet these requirements the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory was started in 1887, as the successor to an earlier laboratory at Annisquam, and has since become a great Summer congress for biologists from all parts of the country. It is safe to say that no other institution has been of equal service in securing for biology the high plane it now occupies in American science. The leading spirit in the establishment of this laboratory and its director for many years was Charles O. Whitman.
Successful marine laboratories are located also at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island; at Harpswell, Maine; and at Bermuda. The Carnegie Institution maintains a laboratory at Tortugas Island, Florida, for the investigation of tropical marine life.
On the Pacific Coast marine laboratories are located at Pacific Grove and at La Jolla, California, and at Friday Harbor, Washington. Several other biological laboratories are open each Summer on our coasts, as well as a number of fresh-water laboratories on the interior lakes. There are also several mountain laboratories. The influence of these laboratories on American biology is immeasurable.
Natural History Museums.
Museums of Natural History or “Cabinets of Natural Curios” as they were sometimes called, were established in the first half of the nineteenth century in connection with the various natural history societies. These were of much service in stimulating the collection of zoological “specimens” and in arousing a popular interest in natural history.
The zoological museum of earlier days consisted of rows on rows of systematically arranged specimens, each carefully labelled with scientific name, locality, date of collection and donor—much like the pages of a catalogue. All this has now been changed; the bottles of specimens have been relegated to the storeroom, and the great plate glass cases of the modern museum represent individual studies in the various fields of modern zoological research, or individual chapters in the latest biological text-books. Often the talent of the artist and the skill of the taxidermist are cunningly combined to produce most realistic bits of nature.
The United States National Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Columbian Museum and the Museum of Comparative Zoology are among the finest museums of the world, while many of the states, cities, and universities maintain public museums as a part of their educational systems.
Systematic Zoology and Taxonomy.
The work in systematic zoology is now mainly carried on by specialists in relatively small groups of animals. This is necessitated both by the increasingly large number of species known to science and by the completeness and exactness with which species must now be defined. The majority of systematic workers are now connected with museums where the large collections furnish material for comparative studies.
Prominent in this field is the United States National Museum, the publications of which are mainly taxonomic and zoogeographic, and cover every group of organism. The adequacy of this great museum for such studies may be illustrated by the collection of mammals. This museum has the types of 1135 of the 2138 forms (including species and subspecies) of North American mammals recognized in Miller’s list,[[175]] and less than 200 forms lack representatives among the 120,000 specimens of mammals. Systematic monographs of several of the orders of mammals have been published.