Of course, our own British water-lilies cannot compare with the magnificent Victoria regia of the tropics. Its petals are white or pink on the inside, and its gigantic leaves, six feet or more in diameter, can support a retriever dog or a child. There used to be some of them at Kew Gardens. A curious point about these enormous floating leaves is that they are covered with little spiny points on the under side and at the margin; that is probably to keep some sort of fish from nibbling at the edges.
But to return to our pond. Beyond the water-lily region and so long as the water is from twelve to twenty-four feet deep, Pondweeds are able to grow, and their leaves may be seen in the water, whilst their stalks stand up above the surface so as to allow wind to scatter the pollen.
This depth of twenty-four feet seems at first sight very great, but it is a mere nothing compared with the regions entirely below the water, where certain Stoneworts (Chara) and Mosses have been found flourishing. The former has been dredged up from depths of ninety feet, and a little moss was discovered in the Lake of Geneva growing quite comfortably at a depth of 180 feet below the surface.
But it is quite impossible to appreciate the wonder and beauty of the life in a pond unless by a strong effort of the imagination.
Suppose yourself to be a fish two or three inches long, and accustomed to the dim, mysterious light which filters down through the water from the sky above. Every here and there great olive-brown leaf-stalks and stems cross and, branching, intercept the light. Everything, the surface of the mud, the stems and branches of the submerged water-plants, is covered by an exquisite golden-brown powder, which consists of hundreds and thousands of "Diatoms." Here and there from the Pondweed and other stems hang festoons or wreaths or threads of beautiful green Algæ. Little branching sprays of them, or perhaps of the brown kind, are attached here and there to the thick stems.
Even the very water is full of small, floating, vivid green stars or crescents or three-cornered pieces which are free floating Algæ or Desmids. Other diatoms are also free or swim with a cork-screwing motion through the water. Great snails and slugs crawl upon the plants, and weird large-eyed creatures, with a superfluity of legs and an entire absence of reserve as to what is going on inside their bodies, skirmish around. So that such a pond is full of vegetable activity. The free-swimming diatoms and desmids make up the food of the snails and crustaceans. These latter in turn are the food of fishes.
It is even possible to-day by carefully stocking an artificial pond with water plants, by then introducing Mollusca and Crustacea, and finally by the introduction of "eyed ova" or fry of the trout, carp, or other fishes, to produce a regular population of fishes which can be made more or less profitable, and the process can be spoken of as "fish-farming." Unfortunately there are a great many gaps in our knowledge as to what fish actually feed on, and we know even less about what the Mollusca and Crustacea require.
There is, however, a distinct annual harvest of these minute seaweeds, of which different sorts appear to develop one after the other, just as flowering plants do. The two months January and February, which are almost without flowers, are also those in which most of these minute vegetables take their repose in the form of cysts or spores.
But these diatoms are too important and too interesting to be dismissed in such a cursory manner. Each consists of a tiny speck of living matter with a drop or two of oil enclosed in a variously sculptured flinty shell. They have, in fact, been compared to little protected cruisers which pass to and fro in the water and multiply with the most extraordinary rapidity.
If you (1) use dynamite to blast a rock, (2) if you employ a microscope or telescope, (3) if you paint an oil picture, (4) if you make a sound-proof partition in a set of offices, the probability is that it has been necessary to use the substance diatomite in each case. This consists of the accumulated shells of myriads of diatoms.