144 BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 



and heighten one's delight in the natural world by recalling pleasing experiences, by 

 introducing novel objects, and by conveying agreeable or important information, is the 

 task ot the aquarium manager, as it is that of the director of the zoological garden 

 and that of. the curator of the natural- history museum. To use aquarium material 

 merely for display and not mainly for instruction is as silly as to attempt to make 

 butterflies more beautiful by arranging them in the form of a star; and to put into the 

 water with an imprisoned living animal anything which misrepresents it to an ordinary 

 observer is not only mischievous, but base. 



These are high principles, and in an exposition aquarium as large as ours, 

 repaired, finished, furnished, and stocked in three months of almost unexampled 

 winter and one of stormy spring, it was not, of course, always as easy to live up to 

 them as if one could have had the advantage of some years of leisurely preparation. 

 But we did as well as we could, more conscious than anyone else could be of the dis- 

 tance between ideal and realization, and glad all along that we had so much for our 

 visitors to look at that they rarely thought of the things which we could not get. 



January 1, 1803, the Aquarium annex of the Fisheries Building was as cold as an 

 ice-house, its tanks all unfinished, black caverns of asphalt dimly seen through dirty 

 glass, most of them leaky (as we found when it became warm enough to permit us to 

 let water into them) and the water-pipes burst by freezing all over the building — a 

 discouraging wreck, much of which had finally to be taken down and replaced. 



The principal things to be done with the least possible delay were to test the suffi- 

 ciency of the aquarium tanks and to make such changes and repairs as this test should 

 show the need of; to finish suitably the interior of these tanks with such naturalistic 

 and decorative work as would make them a fit home for the various aquatic forms they 

 were to contain; to get the earliest possible start of aquatic vegetation as a further 

 naturalistic decoration; to repair the burst and broken water-pipes for the convey- 

 ance of water, salt and fresh, to the tanks and away again; to get the heating plant 

 enlarged so that water might be admitted to the building without danger of freez- 

 ing;* to provide a pool or inclosure for the reception of fishes as brought in, that 

 suitable selection might be made of uninjured and vigorous specimens for the aqua- 

 rium, and that a good stock might be kept in hand from which the aquarium tanks 

 could be replenished as disease or accident should make this needful; to introduce 

 filters for the salt and fresh water, neither of which had as yet been provided; to plan 

 and manufacture apparatus for the warming of the water in spring and fall and for 

 its cooling in midsummer; to complete and test the electric pumping outfit for the 

 circulation of the salt water; to bring, nearly a thousand miles from the sea, a supply 

 of salt water sufficient to fill aquaria of a capacity of 40,000 gallons, together with a 

 pumping supply in the huge cisterns of the sea-water system; and, most difficult and 

 responsible task of all, to accomplish the object for which all the rest was planned, 

 namely, to assemble collections in extraordinary number and in the largest possible 

 variety from the Great Lakes, from the rivers and smaller streams of the interior, 

 from both oceans, and from the Gulf, such as should illustrate the aquatic fauna of 

 the country properly and in a way to justify the large expenditures already made and 

 and those still needed for the completion of the exhibit. 



* The temperature in tbe aquarium annex fell at one time toll F. while the heatera were carrying 

 all the steam allowed. 





