120 THE PRESERVATION OF MARINE ANIMALS
until perfect tranquillity and healthy surrounding conditions tempt
the creatures to expand again and breathe or feed freely. The
violence with which the capture of such animals is often necessarily
accompanied causes them to be contracted when first obtained, and
they contract whenever they are taken out of sea water, only expand-
ing when- submerged and left undisturbed for some time. Unless
the necessary precautions are taken, the slightest attempt at killing
the animals for preservation produces sudden and complete con-
traction, and the idea of obtaining dead specimens permanently
preserved, in the condition which was natural to them when alive and
expanded, seems incapable of realisation.
Nevertheless, the difficulties involved have in recent years been
to a great extent overcome. The improvement and invention of
methods of preservation has been made a special object at the
Zoological Station of Naples, and the perfection of the specimens
sent out from that institution has become celebrated all over the
world. In 1890 the chief of the department by which the work of
preservation was carried out was authorised to make public the
methods he had adopted, with all their refinements, and these
methods are described at length in a paper in the "Mittheilungen
aus der Zoologischen Station zu Neapel," bd. ix. (1890) pp. 435—
474. The paper has been translated or abstracted in various
journals. A complete translation into French is published in the
"Bulletin Scientifique de la France et de la Belgique," tome xxiii.,
part i. (1891), and an abstract so comprehensive as to be almost a
complete English translation, will be found in the "Journal of the
Royal Microscopical Society," of February, 1891, published by
Williams and Norgate. The latter journal is easily accessible to
English readers, and the summary of Lo Bianco's paper which it
contains may be consulted for more minute details than are given in
the present paper. It should be remembered that the reagents
employed at Naples have long been in general use, as well as many
of the methods described by Lo Bianco, and that, although he has
invented many methods and improved others, his great success has
been due, not so much to the use of processes unknown to others,
as to his intelligence and patience, and to the skill begotten of long
practice and scientific attention to details. Much of the renown of
the Naples preparations is also owing to the abundant, varied, and
beautiful fauna of the Mediterranean, and of the Bay of Naples in
particular.