Anton Dohrn

Abstract

THE whole biological world will feel a pang of grief at the news of the death of Anton Dohrn, the founder and director of the Zoological Station of Naples. It is true that he had accomplished the great work which he set himself forty years ago, and had seen the projects and dreams of his youth fully realised- and more than realised. I met Dohrn first in 1870 at Liverpool, when Huxley was president of the British Association, and in May and June of the next year went, after a winter spent in Leipzig, to join him at Jena, where he was a “privat-docent” in zoology. He was then thirty years of age, and had done some excellent embryological work on the Crustacea, in furtherance of which he had passed some months at Naples and Messina. His father, with whom I later spent some weeks at Naples, was a very remarkable man, one of the iron-willed, somewhat grim type of North Germans, a handsome old gentleman, known throughout Europe as a great collector of Coleoptera, a hobby which brought him into close personal friendship with similar enthusiasts in Italy, Spain, England, and -France, whom he visited from time to time. He enjoyed an ample income from a sugar-refining business in Stettin, where he resided, and was anxious that Anton should accept the post of director of the Hamburg Zoological Garden, marry, and settle down there. But when I knew him at Jena, Anton had already made up his mind to do something really large and important for the progress of zoological science. Like others who had visited the Mediterranean in order to study its rich marine life, he had felt the difficulty of carrying on such work in lodgings, without apparatus, without library, and at the mercy of the fishermen whom it was necessary to employ and to conciliate. The French naturalist Coste had, when employed by the Government of the Second Empire to study economic questions connected with the national fisheries, established a laboratory, with aquaria, tanks, and fishing-boats, at Concarneau, on the Brittany coast. Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers had also arranged a permanent marine biological laboratory for himself and his pupils. The plan took shape in Anton Dohrn's mind of establishing a larger and more completely equipped laboratory than these on the Mediterranean coast, and, but for the war between France and Germany, he would probably have carried out his first intention and placed his laboratory on the coast near Marseilles. When I knew him he had already thought out the scheme which he realised, and had determined to try to secure a site at Naples in the Villa Reale, which stretches along the shore. He had succeeded with no little difficulty in securing a certain sum of money from his father-his heritage, in fact- and he intended deliberately to risk this in his enterprise. His plan was to secure the cooperation of all European universities in building and maintaining the Naples laboratory, or “station,” as he proposed to call it. This meant, in all cases but that of England, the cooperation of the State Governments. But in order to obtain this support and cooperation he realised that it was necessary, at whatever effort and risk, to make a plunge-to start the “stazione,” to erect a fine and imposing building, to demonstrate the convenience and excellence of its organisation, and thus to secure approval and unhesitating financial assistance. His plan was to sink his own fortune in that first step, and he did so. He obtained help from friends both at home and in this country as the building grew, and by tactful appeal and untiring effort-involving years of work given up to persuading statesmen, politicians, associations, professors, millionaires, and emperors of the value and importance of the great Naples “Stazione Zoologica” he achieved for it a splendid and permanent position.