XVIISummer Science
“MY young friend, Portia,” said Professor Maturin, “was plainly dubious when I suggested making a week-end visit to the scientific colony where she planned to spend the summer doing research work in biology. She did not believe that I would be interested in observing a hundred college professors and students listening to lectures and looking through microscopes. She implied that occasional visitors were felt, by their holiday moods, somewhat to distract the attention of the serious workers. And, finally, she suggested that I was perhaps temperamentally unsuited to lead the very simple life that prevailed, the place being as unlike as possible to the typical summer resort. However, when I pleaded my sympathetic interest in all things human, modestly called attention to my reputation for discretion, and gently reminded her that I had proved an acceptable and even welcome guest among the peace agitators of Lake Placid, the literati of Onteora, and the artists of Cornish, she ceased to protest. I might do as I liked; she, of course, would be glad to see me.
“So it was that I found myself, one calm Saturday evening, en route for her ‘Marine Biological Laboratory.’ During my sail along the Sound I found myself amusedly wondering whether Portia’s professors would prove to be anything like the important mate who gave so many more and so much louder orders than were necessary, in warping the boat from the dock. I was pleased to find them rather more like the lights that later appeared along the shore—some clear and steady, some brilliant but intermittent, others a trifle spectacular in coloring, all plainly enjoying a comfortable sense of their importance to the community; but all of them interesting, and some performing services really indispensable to human progress.
“The realization of high thinking and, presumably, plain living began with a six o’clock landing next morning and the writer’s earliest breakfast in years, watching, meanwhile, coming events cast their shadows before in the person of a slender spectacled gentleman in blue, who slowly consumed one roll and a cup of frequently diluted coffee, while he rapidly assimilated the contents of a thin, black, scientific-looking volume with round corners and red edges.
“Within an hour, on a smaller steamer, wesighted the red brick, yellow shingle, and green slate buildings of a station of the United States Fish Commission. It was because of this station, devoted to everything that affects our fisheries, and of its especial facilities for collecting and preserving marine life, that a group of college scientists established the biological laboratory by its side, some twenty years ago. Their leader was still the director, and although most of the administrative details were now delegated to younger men, he was still regularly in residence, in a cottage erected by his appreciative colleagues to replace one destroyed by fire, and surrounded by hundreds of carefully reared pigeons, which for years he had made the basis of minute studies in heredity, with the aid of two Japanese artists, who painstakingly recorded the contour and coloring of every peculiar bird.
“The slow and careful entrance of the steamer into the landlocked harbor, through passages so tortuous as to make a local pilot often necessary, indicated the peculiar geographical character of the locality. So great has been the sea’s erosion that it is difficult to say whether the rocky shore line most resembled the margin of a cake at which youthful teeth had been at work, or the end of a flag whipped into tatters by the wind.It is this intricate character of the region that makes it the congenial home of many sea creatures elsewhere obtainable only with difficulty.
“Portia met me at the pier, explaining her somewhat tempered summer bloom by the fact that she was spending the sunniest hours of the day indoors in the laboratory. She conducted me through a typical, old-time New England village of perhaps five hundred inhabitants, through streets almost as devious as the waterways, and similarly appropriated by science. Next to the village church, which displayed the usual placard that the ladies of the congregation were about to hold a fair where refreshments and a large assortment of aprons might be had, the village store made the unusual announcement that pure paraffin and proof alcohol were always on hand, and that microscopes with all attachments might be ordered. This emporium was even the subject of a biological joke, which Portia kindly explained to me: ‘Why was Portrope’s shop like an amoeba?’ ‘Because it was a single cell with all the functions.’ This comforted me with the feeling that even if the scientists did take themselves seriously, they yet preserved the saving grace of humor.
“I was led to the most remarkable lodgingsthat I have ever occupied, kept by a publisher’s reader, who had elected to spend her summer in this way for the sake of variety. I am convinced that she got it, or at any rate, that she gave it. Her furnishings were of the simplest, and the strangest, having been leased from the amoeba at ten per cent of their cost for each month of use—an arrangement which, like the furnishings, would scarcely have been acceptable to any but an imagination that had been subjected to the severest strains.
“The roof also leaked, but in such a desultory fashion that it was about the only thing in the place that impressed me as free from the influence of scientific efficiency. But the house was directly on the harbor, my room overlooking that and the laboratory, which occupied a compound next to the commission. Portia departing to finish a drawing before the bathing hour, I was left to observe with interest, at a window opposite, an assiduous young man intently bent over his work, which, Portia informed me later, was a study of the coagulation of lobster’s blood. Subsequent observation of a few of his neighbors convinced me that at least some of the investigators were not unacquainted with academic leisure. Down by the shore an officer of our regular army nurseswas living in a specimen hospital tent, for the purpose of testing the capabilities of its construction, texture, and color for service in the field.
“The taste of the publisher’s reader was equal if not superior to her imagination. If the house reminded me that she was in the habit of receiving many strange things, the food was proof that her standard of acceptance was very high. Steamed clams, real chicken, and delicious vegetables, where they must have been by no means easy to procure; lobster in a chafing-dish, fruit sherbet, and thoroughly sophisticated coffee, formed our Sunday dinner. The conversation was no less interesting, my opposite at table being a distinguished biological painter. It had never previously occurred to me that of course there must be such. Usually busied in evoking the outward form and semblance of prehistoric creatures from their remains in museums, he was here for semi-recreation, painting marine life from the aquaria of the Fish Commission. I was later presented to the object of his current admiration, a creature with the anatomy of a frying-pan and the manners of the Bowery, popularly known as a ‘stingray’ because of a dangerous weapon in its tail. His next sitter was to be a rare specimen of parasite fish, which, although nearly two feet long, wasderiving all its locomotion about the tank from a much-embarrassed but helpless shark, to the under side of which it was complacently attached by means of a suction arrangement on the top of its head.
“Portia, like most of the other students, had lodgings in a private house in the village, there being not more than half a dozen cottages exclusively devoted to summer guests. She took her meals at the laboratory mess, where the plain but adequate food was flavored with abundant talk of distribution, variation, regeneration, mutation, and the dynamics of protoplasm. Having once fixed these catchwords in mind, I rapidly acquired the local language, and could shortly ask simple questions without difficulty.
“In addition to the long, low mess hall, the laboratory occupied three other square, two-story buildings of gray shingle, set off by dark green paint. The largest, with several wings, contained class-rooms and laboratories for two of the three regular courses of instruction in physiology, morphology, and embryology. On the upper floor was an excellent technical library with Agassiz’s motto, ‘Study nature, not books.’ Around the sides of both floors and in the other buildings were individual working rooms, in which themore advanced investigators sentenced themselves to solitary confinement during the major part of each day. These rooms and the students’ tables in the several larger rooms were at the disposal of the colleges from whose annual contributions most of the working funds of the laboratory are derived.
“During the six weeks of regular class instruction in July and August, there are two or more public evening lectures each week, in which visiting scholars present the more generally interesting aspects of their special fields of study. I did not share Portia’s enthusiastic anticipation of the coming of a lecturer who had just returned from hunting a particular variety of snail in the South Sea Islands, but the lecture changed my apprehension to appreciation, and, finally, to admiration.
“Other lectures dealt quite as attractively with the development of habits among birds, the detection of the minute organisms that cause many human diseases, the study of heredity in families of rabbits and guinea-pigs, and the creation of new forms of plant life. Every considerable investigation of which I heard had definite relation to some generalization that was capable of practical application—a striking contrast to similar work in certain other sciences.
“Portia’s problem, which I was interested to find important enough to deserve a private room, was the regeneration of planarians, minute marine parasites which have the power, when divided, of developing new heads or tails. Her endeavor was, by means of a microscope, magnifying some twelve hundred times, to observe and trace the earliest differentiation of the cells that were to form the several new organs. Of the hundred or more students in residence, about half of them young women, perhaps one-half were carrying on similar studies, of varying degrees of difficulty. Among these were college professors and instructors who were conducting researches that had extended over many years. The volumes of the laboratory’s monthly publication, containing records of the processes and results of such work, made more than ordinarily interesting reading, even for the layman.
“The recreations of the place were as interesting as its labors. The social life was that of a highly selected college community, where everybody knows everybody else and his wife, and finds them well worth knowing; and everywhere, always, there rose and fell a tide of excellent talk.
“In short, I had so good a time that I visitedPortia not three days, but ten, and then departed with a regret that was not dispelled even when she formally approved my conduct by inviting me to come again. She was so smiling and sympathetic at the pier that I found myself asking a question that had repeatedly suggested itself, but which had as often been spontaneously repressed.
“What, if any, was the definite or practical value of her summer’s work, as compared with that which she had previously been doing in the field of domestic science? That, she replied, was for me to determine. Perhaps, when I thought it all over, some such bearing would occur to me. I was afraid that she was going to be disappointed in me, after all, and hastened to change the subject by inquiring why, since the afternoon was so fine, she was wearing her long oilskin coat and sou’wester hat. It was certainly a becoming costume, although it too much concealed her trim figure—her color was now all that could be desired.
“‘Oh, I don’t work in the laboratory all of the time,’ she answered. ‘I—that is, we—are going sailing.’ Just at that moment the importunate mate’s ‘All aboard’ precluded further leave-taking. But as I watched her from the deck of thereceding steamer, after a farewell wave of the hand, turn expectantly toward a jaunty sail-boat that was skimming in the direction of the pier under the guidance of one of the younger professors, I began to have glimmerings of at least one answer to my question.”