EECREATIVE SCIENCE. 



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countless forms, each in itself perfect, needed 

 notliing less than Almighty power, it needed 

 Almighty power too to complete the scheme 

 in the institution of dissolution ; and the grim 

 king of terrors, before whom the bee and the 

 sparrow tremble, perhaps, not less than man, 

 became co-worker with God by a wise and 

 beneficent appointment : and so the orders of 

 being began, and have to this hour continued, 

 as a series of dissolving views, in which there 

 is no hiatus, but only change; no shifting 

 of the focus or the screen, no aberration or 

 intermission of the source of light, but an 

 unending variety in the pictures. We know 

 not how other worlds may fare, but this we 

 know, that here death supplies from every 

 extinguished picture the colours with which 

 the next are painted, and we live — man and 

 brute — on the debris of the past. 



I see all this and more in the a<xiiarium j 

 it teaches me lessons in physics, and, I trust, 

 also teaches me that the moral and spiritual 

 truths of the universe may be illustrated, 

 sometimes explained, by a patient study of 

 the commonest things. The aquarium is a 

 world in little ; it sustains itself. For the 

 moment, I put aside the law of gravity as 

 a universal law, and the presence of the 

 atmosphere as a universal thing, and I call it 

 a world, needing no aid for its continuance 

 and the perfect adjustment of its balance of 

 power from external things. I take a vessel 

 of glass, a few pebbles, a few pieces of sand- 

 stone rock, and a sufficiency of water, and to 

 that I commit my fishes and insects, and say, 

 " There is your world ; the order of nature 

 is such, that you may henceforth live and die 

 without human interference." I say nothing 

 here of the details of management ; I am 

 looking for instruction in the laws of life 

 and death. 



The two requisites of animal life, food and 

 air, must be generated in this world, or it 

 ceases to instruct me ; yet the water contains 

 but little of each, and whence is its supply 

 to come ? Grod has ordained such a wealth 



of organic forms, that wherever the con- 

 ditions of life are found, life takes possession 

 of the spot, whether it be the bottom of the 

 ocean, the dripping roof of a cave, the ex- 

 panse of the viewless air, or the mimic lake 

 I call an aquarium. Forthwith the dead 

 stones become alive with greenness, the glass 

 walls assume the semblance of a meadow, the 

 milky hue of the water disappears as the 

 earthy particles it held in solution subside, 

 and the light that streams through it takes a 

 tint of greenness. There is an order of vege- 

 tation appointed to occupy such sites, and 

 almost every non-metallic, and some metallic 

 substances too, become speedily coated with 

 confervas, when their surfaces are kept moist 

 a sufficient length of time. Were it not so, 

 the inhabitants of my world must perish; 

 and to prove the fact I try an experiment. 

 I place some fishes in a clean vessel of water, 

 without pebbles and without rock ; the mo- 

 ment the first dim bronzy speck appears, I 

 rub it ofi" the glass, and so thwart the course 

 of Nature. The fishes soon exhaust the water 

 of its oxygen, and though the water attempts 

 to renew its supplies by absorption from the 

 atmosphere, the compensation is too slow, 

 the fishes come gasping to the surface, and 

 in a short while perish. 



Even then I learn something from their 

 death if I leave the vessel in the hands of 

 Nature. Death has no sooner spread his 

 black banner over my household gods than 

 life of another kind arises to confound him, 

 and the microscope reveals to me myriads of 

 animals and plants, and organisms that seem- 

 ingly occupy an intermediate place between 

 the two great kingdoms, rioting upon the 

 wreck that death has made. My half-dozen 

 dead fishes have given birth to existences nu- 

 merous as the stars in heaven, or as the sand 

 upon the sea-shore, innumerable. While 

 these devour the banquet death has spread 

 for them, while forests of confervoid threads 

 rise in silken tufts like microscopic savannahs, 

 Nature is passing portions of the ichthyic 



