I.
It is said of Milton that in two short lines of poetry he made four mistakes in Natural History. He said of a whale:
“At his gills takes in,
And at his trunk lets out a sea.”
Now, in the first place, the whale has no gills; second, he takes in air instead of water; third, he throws out expired air; fourth, the water “spouted” is thrown up by the force of expiration, not out of the animal’s body, but water that may lie between the “blow-hole” and the surface of the sea.
I am not so sure but Milton made more than four mistakes in these lines. For whoever starts out on a wrong premise will follow a line of mistakes continually. Nevertheless, mistakes attentively observed may be profitable. We learn by mistakes. Unsuccessful experiments are mistakes of a kind—something wrong in the formula. The first aquarium I tried to start I made more mistakes than Milton made in his two lines. I made mistakes the second trial, and the third, and a dozen more times. And when I have succeeded in some instances, it was by accident, and to-day I can not tell why I sometimes failed, or why I sometimes succeeded. I have the consolation, however, of company in this respect. One of the most successful managers of aquaria says that he would give very much if he knew how to grow some of the higher marine algæ as one grows plants in a garden. Occasionally he has succeeded, but he confesses it was not by skill, but by chance.
I propose, therefore, that for a little while we consider the sea as an aquarium—a place adapted to the growth of animals and plants. Our subject is somewhat large, I must confess, but if we can see and understand how these things live and grow in the ocean we must be able to grow them in our parks, and possibly in our houses. For what Nature does on a grand scale may also be done in a small way; and principles that govern the successful growth of plants and animals in a bottle of sea water must be the same that govern the fauna and flora of the Pacific Ocean.
In order then to study and understand these things it will not be entirely necessary to make a trip to the equator, to the poles, or to travel around the world.
It has been a favorite theory with Henry D. Thoreau and John Burroughs, those genial and poetical lovers and observers of nature, that we need not rove all over the earth, as is the custom of many, to see this curiosity or that, or to observe nature in her secret recesses, but that we only have to sit down in the woods or by the sea-shore, and everything of interest will come round to us. The little town of Concord was a whole world in miniature to Thoreau. Everything worth finding could be found there. And so to John Burroughs, is the juniper forest of the Hudson, a show case, with the whole world inside. “Nature,” he says, “comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and a traveler also.”
I think we may infer from this theory of our charming philosophers rather a poetical interpretation. They would urge a careful observation and study of phenomena in and near the places where we live, rather than gadding up and down the earth in search of novelties. If we familiarize ourselves with every day common objects and events of plants, animals, and other operations in nature, we shall then always be at home when nature calls, whether on one side or the other of the world.