Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change”—
for he was enabled safely and successfully to examine in the most hidden recesses and retreats of the rocks and sea many wonderful creatures, the knowledge of which had been hitherto hidden from the scientific world.
The invention, or introduction rather, of the salt-water aquarium enables any one nowadays to study in comfort and at leisure the habits and peculiarities of marine animals. There is a drawing extant of an aquarium bearing the date 1742. Sir John Graham Dalyell, a well-known author, had a modest one early in this century. A sea-anemone taken from the sea in 1828, and placed in this glass tank, was, according to his biographer, alive and well in 1873; so that M. Figuier in claiming its first suggestion for M. Charles des Moulins is wrong. The fact is that the ancients kept, not for scientific, but for gastronomic purposes, fish and molluscs in tanks, and fed and studied their habits and needs in order to fit them for the table. These were practical aquaria.
M. des Moulins, however, and, in our own country, Gosse and Warington, deserve full credit for advocating the establishment of these beautiful sources of rational pleasure and improvement, and for showing how they might best be kept in working order. To Des Moulins is also due the proposition that the animal life therein required the presence of vegetable life to keep it in natural condition. In the fresh-water aquarium duckweed was found to act efficiently, and a similar idea is now adopted in regard to marine plants in the salt-water aquarium. Sea-weeds do not usually bear transplanting, but sea water is so impregnated with seeds or germs, that by placing a few stones or rocks in the tank a crop of marine vegetation is ensured.
“On shell or stone is dropped the embryo seed,
And quickly vegetates a vital breed.”
Our own fish-houses at the Zoological Gardens were first opened in 1853, while those of the French Acclimatisation Society in the Bois de Boulogne were inaugurated in 1861. Now almost every capital possesses one on a grand scale. That at Naples is especially noted. At the Continental fishery exhibitions, held at Amsterdam, The Hague, Boulogne, Havre, Arcachon, &c., temporary aquaria always form part of the attractions.
The dimensions of the great aquarium at Brighton are as follows: Its area is 716 feet by 100 feet, the great tank alone containing 110,000 gallons of water, and having a plate glass front 130 feet long, through which the habits of very large fish may be studied. The rock-work of the tanks is artificial, and admirably adapted to give shelter to the fish and crustaceans which disport in them. The management of a large aquarium involves constant care, and it is quite possible to kill its inhabitants by too frequently changing the water—by over-kindness, in fact.