ERMUDA is the perfect place to study and monitor the deep water ocean environment - and that is as true now as it was in 1903 when the BBSR was established.

The islands are the exposed portion of an extinct volcano, whose sides slope steeply down into the ocean. That means deep water is just a short distance away. A ship from a research station on the US east coast would take two hours to reach such depths of ocean.

In addition, Bermuda is more than 500 miles away from any land mass, an ideal mid-ocean monitoring spot.

It was in the late 19th century when Professor Edward Laurens Mark gave an address at Harvard University listing the benefits of Bermuda as a site for a research station.

Before the days of air travel, the relatively short shipping time from New York was a factor, plus the good climate abundant numbers of certain marine species and "the brilliantly coloured animals that inhabit Bermuda; a source of surprise and delight".

Professor Mark was one of the founding fathers of the BBSR, together with Professor Charles Bristol, of New York University and members of Bermuda Natural History Society.

Professor Bristol had recognised the potential of Bermuda as a marine study site when he brought a party of students here in 1897.

Professors Mark and Bristol came to Bermuda together in April, 1903, to look for a site where biologists could be stationed. They successfully sold the idea of a combined public aquarium and marine reasearch laboratory to the colonial government.

A temporary site was found, the Hotel Frascati in Flatts (on the site now occupied by the St. James Court condominiums), to be used for six weeks of research, and the first dozen visitors and students from New York arrived in Hamilton on June 22, 1903.

The scientists had three boats at their disposal during that first summer - a 30-foot sailboat with a glass bottom and two steamers, the and the .

For the next two years, the station's operation remained much the same, a temporary summer study camp at the Hotel Frascati.

In 1907, the station, combined with an aquarium, got itself a more permanent home on Agar's Island in a building previously used by the British military as a powder magazine. The Bermuda Natural History Society had leased the three-acre island from the War Department for ?25 a year.

In subsequent years, visitors and tourists were taken to the aquarium by steam ferry and it rapidly became popular. In 1910, 6,000 visitors were recorded. Agar's Island remained the home of the BBSR until it relocated to its present home in Ferry Reach, St. George's in June,1931.

Professor Mark became the director of the BBSR and stayed in the post until 1932 and remained asociated with the station for most of the rest of his life. Dr. Mark was enamoured with Bermuda's environment, as he made clear in an exert from his address at the inauguration of the station. He spoke of his impression of looking down into inshore waters through a water-glass.

He said: "I confess the pleasure was so great that the spirit of the collector was suppressed for the time being; it seemed sacrilege to touch with such violent hands a picture that showed such harmony and colour, the waving plumes, the graceful branches of the gorgonias; sea fans in purple splendour, coral heads of gold and green; great splotches of coloured sponges encrusting the rocks; soft seaweeds; here and there deep channels with nothing but the clear water and the white sand beneath it; and in and out of this maze of growing things, the graceful, noiseless fishes in such array of colours as is scarcely credible, much less describable."

Dr. Mark continued to visit the bio station until he was 92 years old, long after his tenure as director had finished. He died at the age of 99 in 1946.

It was in the mid-1920s that the BBSR took a great step forward. The station was incorporated in the state of New York in 1926 and this was followed by the Bermuda Biological Station Act being passed by the Bermuda Parliament in 1927.

The Act allowed the BBSR to hold real estate on the island. After 20 potential sites had been looked at, a 12-acre site known as the Hunter Tract in St. George's was chosen. The Act also exempted BBSR from customs duty on laboratory equipment and other imported supplies.

One of the conditions of the Act was that the BBSR trustees should raise ?50,000 as an endowment. That money came from the Rockefeller Foundation, after a successful application to its General Education Board from the BBSR.

before ground had been broken, the BBSR was offered a different, but superior location for the new station, a 14-acre site close to Hunter's Tract on which there were already good buildings, including the Shore Hills Hotel.

So the BBSR asked the Government to take back the Hunter's Tract site and give it back the money it had paid out for it.

After some objections in Parliament from members who thought BBSR had been helped enough, the Government agreed to the request.

BBSR bought the 14-acre Shore Hills Hotel site for $80,000. By June, 1931, research started there and it remains the home of the station today.

Overseeing these monumental changes was Professor Edwin Conklin, elected president of the BBSR in 1926. He remained in office until 1937, overseeing the transformation of the BBSR from an informal summer gathering of scientists to a structured institution devoted to year-round scientific research.

At the official opening of the Shore Hills site, Dr. Conklin remarked: "This new station differs from any and all others in this hemisphere or in the entire world, so far as I know, in being really international in its organisation. There are now more than 200 members of this Corporation, representing ten different countries."

The international approach continues to this day with students and visiting scientists from all corners of the globe.