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GENERAL INTRODUCTION
13
"
International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.”
This council is now ”composed of delegates- from Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, Finland; Germany”, Great Britain,Irish
.
Free State, France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Latvia, Spain
_
and Portugal. It hasasits prime object the improvement of
the Fisheries of the North Sea and surrounding waters,
for these g‘reat shing areas are international in character.
These countries undertake to t out permanent research
vessels and to study denite" problems in
various
areas
of the Sea allotted to them;
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MARINE LABORATORIES
The foundations of the science of oceanography were
.
laid, as we have seen, by the Work of the great marine
expeditions.
But the Work that such expeditions can do
is necessarily limited, they are indispensable for studies
of the
and ora of the open sea, of the nature and
ihhabitants of the bed of the oceans, and of the ocean currents and the nature of the sea in different regions ;. but they
are, ’not suited, clearly enough, for examinations of the
structure
and experiments into the functionig of
_
the
'
animals and plants, or for long continued investigations
into'the seasonal variations in the constitution of the sea
water and its microScopical population, work Which, as
we shall see later, is of the very greatest importance. _ For
_
these investigations it is essential that ‘We should have '
_
‘
laboratories on the
coast where marine animals and plants
can easily be obtained, where they can be kept
aquaria_
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with'running or circulating sea_water as near natural co'nditi0ns as possible, and where'regular samples of
can
be obtained throughout the
and the Variations
in its chemical and physical constitution and its cotained
-
life accurately determined by expert chemiSts'
,.
The need for such laborat0ries‘has reSulted in the
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