Abstract
DURING the winter of 1876, when the Zoological Station was already a fact in brick and mortar, and my late friend, Mr. Frank Balfour, had already shown by his famous work on the Elasmobranch Development how profitable its arrangements might turn out for the progress of research in morphology, I began to busy myself with the literary phase of my enterprise. From the very beginning it had been my intention to erect not merely a simple laboratory, in which a more or less long series of “Contributions to the knowledge” of all sorts of groups or problems ought to be worked out, but to create an organisation which by its own power and weight might influence the further progress and development of morphological science in the direction of greater concentration and by production of such scientific work as could hardly be taken up and still less carried through by individual effort alone. Of course the Zoological Station ought to have its own Journal, similar to the many Journals or Zeitschriften or Archives of other and perhaps less powerful institutions or societies, but I hoped to do more than that. If my ideas of, and confidence in, the future development of the Zoological Station were right, more important productions might be expected from it, and thus it became only a question of organisation and combination of means and ends to secure such a result. I had learned by almost daily experience how difficult, almost hopeless, it was to succeed with the specific determination of all the numberless organisms, worms, crustaceans, hydroids, tunicates, &c, &c, which our fishermen brought to light day by day. Even if the library of the Zoological Station at that time had been complete enough, it would have been almost impossible to ascertain the names of all these creatures, the descriptions and figures in former works being far too incomplete and too superficial to enable even specialists of all these groups to decide which name belonged to which animal. All attempts to form a well-determined collection of any group—not excluding even the larger crustaceans, echinoderms, and medusas— failed, and sometimes to such a degree that my assistants and myself simply felt ourselves in the midst of chaos. This may sound strange to conchologists, ornithologists, and entomologists, who can rely on splendid monographs and innumerable synopsis and similar works for classification, but it is nevertheless a deplorable fact for the marine fauna of almost all the seas. And the want is greatly felt, for the marine organisms in by far the greater number of cases require not only an outside investigation by a simple magnifying glass, but microscopical examination of anatomy and development, both embryological and larval, to state definitely to which species they belong, the sexual difference being often so great as to have given occasion to create different genera and even groups for male and female of the same species, and the larval forms in many cases being so utterly unlike the adults that they have been classified in different orders ! Tornaria is now known as the larva of Balanoglossus, whereas not long ago it was supposed to belong to the Echinoderms. What can be more unlike each other than male and female of Bonellia viridis? How long did it take to ascertain the true relation of the so-called Hectocotylus to the Cephalopods? And only a few years ago a simple appendage of a well-known mollusc, Tethys, was described as a special genus by one of the most distinguished French zoologists. Such being thedifficulties it can hardly be wondered at that, for instance, the same species of a Pycnogonid has had the honour of being described under nine specific and generic names, the greater part of them even by the same author, because he ignored that male and female differed, and that their larval stages again differed from each other and from the adult.
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DOHRN, A. Publications of the Zoological Station at Naples. Nature 48, 440–443 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/048440a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/048440a0