I 113 J 



knowledge, as in that particular department which related to tbe 

 life-history of marine life, whether aniaial or vegetable. There were 

 plenty of manuals and very admirable treatises on the classification of 

 marine zoology and botany, and capital works descriptive of the 

 anatomy and physiology of fish, some of them containing very beau- 

 tiful drawings of the animals described, but unfortunately they all 

 dealt with the dead animal. None of them gave, from the actual 

 observations of the writei's, any description of the life-history, for 

 the simple reason that the authors, fi-om no fault of their own, were 

 unable to observe the animals they described in the element in 

 which they "lived, and moved, and had their being." The wonder 

 really was that men like Tarrell and others had been able to tell us 

 so much as they did about some of the habits and peculiarities of 

 the inhabitants of the deep. 



So great was the ignorance of the learned in fish matters, that 

 it might with the greatest safety be said, that before the Aquarium 

 in Brighton was opened, it would have been difiicult, if not abso- 

 lutely impossible, to find half-a-dozen men in England, who could 

 have told them anything of the life-history of the commonest fish 

 of the sea, or been able, if an Aquarium upon a large scale had been 

 placed under their charge, to have fed and kept alive half-a-dozen 

 different kinds of fish. It was pei-fectly true that books in plenty 

 had been wi-itten about aquaria, and that aquaria on a moderate 

 scale had been managed, and much knowledge obtained about some 

 forms of marine life, notably among sea anemones and some of the 

 moUusca ; but the observations were carried on in glass and stone 

 jars and bottles, or in aquaria which held at most only a few pails 

 of sea water or artificial sea water, which some, even now that 

 aquaria of great size were being constructed, pretended to prefer to 

 genuine sea water. 



As with every undertaking for the advancement of >cience and 

 natural history in this country, so with the endeavours to extend our 

 knowledge of marine zoology, we were not indebted to public, but 

 private, enterprise. He need scarcely remind them that the 

 Brighton Aquarium was neither a Government institution, supported 

 by a grant from the Treasury, nor yet a branch of the British or 

 South Kensington Museums, built at the seaside, the better to 

 enable the officers of those national institutions to become 

 acquainted with marine zoology and botany, but that it was 



