Their abundance is not the only merit, however, of the eggs of pelagic creatures, in the eyes of the biologist. By equal good-fortune it chances that colorless things are at a premium in the sea, since to escape the eye of your enemy is a prime consideration. So the eggs in question are usually transparent, and thus, shielded from the vision of marine enemies, are beautifully adapted for the observation of the biologist. As a final merit, they are mostly of convenient size for manipulation under the microscope. For many reasons, then, the marine egg offers incomparable advantages to the student of cell life, an egg being the typical cell. And since nowadays the cell is the very focus of attention in the biological world, the importance of marine laboratories has been enhanced proportionately.
But of course not all the work can be done with eggs or with living specimens of any kind. It is equally important on occasion to examine the tissues of adult specimens, and for this, as a rule, the tissues must first be subjected to some preserving and hardening process preliminary to the cutting of sections for microscopical examination. This is done simply enough in the case of some organisms, but there is a large class of filmy, tenuous, fragile creatures in the sea population of which the jellyfish may be mentioned as familiar examples. Such creatures, when treated in an ordinary way, by dropping them into alcohol, shrivel up, coming to resemble nothing in particular, and ceasing to have any value for the study of normal structures. How to overcome this difficulty was one of the problems attacked from the beginning at the Naples laboratory. The chief part of the practical work of these experiments fell to the share of Signor Lo Bianco. The success that attended his efforts is remarkable. To-day you may see at the laboratory all manner of filmy, diaphanous creatures preserved in alcohol, retaining every jot of their natural contour, and thus offering unexampled opportunities for study _en masse_, or for being sectioned for the microscope. The methods by which this surprising result has been accomplished are naturally different for different creatures; Signor Lo Bianco has written a book telling how it all has been done. Perhaps the most important principle involved with a majority of the more tenuous forms is to stupefy the animal by gradually adding small quantities of a drug, such as chloral, to the water in which the creature is detained. When by this means the animal has been rendered so insensible that it responds very sluggishly to stimuli, it is plunged into a toxic solution, usually formaline, which kills it so suddenly that its muscles in their benumbed state have not time to contract.