THE AQUARIUM. 63 
interesting aspects, may be wrought into attractive 
decorations for our ordinary living-rooms, with very 
little trouble or expense. 
“ By means of an aquarium, the forms and habits 
of fish, reptiles, and aquatic insects [also,] may be 
made to develop themselves under our eyes, undis- 
turbed by the continual necessity of changing the 
water; thus affording us the curious spectacle of 
many phases of animal life that have hitherto been 
concealed in depths inaccessible to the observation 
of the most curious.” Z 
A very interesting circumstance which appears to 
have occurred during some of the early researches 
of the same author in aquatic animal life, although a 
digression from our subject, is too curious to be 
omitted. 
He says, “ A strange, scorpion-like creature, after 
exercising its voracious appetite upon every other 
living thing in the vessel in which I had placed it, 
seemed suddenly to lose all taste for the luxuries of 
the palate, notwithstanding a copious supply of the 
living delicacies it was most fond of, and with which 
I had taken care to furnish it at regular intervals. 
It became restless and apparently diseased, and I 
concluded that I was about to lose this favorite spe- 
cimen as I had lost so many others. Its uneasiness, 
however, took quite a different turn to the one I ex- 
pected, ending in nothing less than a determination 
to leave its native element. Had I seen a Carp or a 
Tench quietly walk out of the fish-pond and climb a 
tree, I could not have been more astonished than 
