t!t»72 Tat; ZiOuLuciisx — liEPTEMBEK, 1873. 



demon ! Can he be jealous of his inornate mate ? jealous of the 

 advent of other lanthes ? Yes, but he is only jealous of their 

 meddling with his nursery : the loves of the fishes are wonderful, 

 and man's sagacity cannot understand them. 



But I am putting the cart before the horse : 1 have prepared a 

 receptacle for this lanthe, a lozenge-glass eight inches in diameter 

 and twelve inches in height; two inches of loam cover the bottom, 

 and perhaps an inch of very clean and very fine gravel covers the 

 loam ; a plant of Valisneria spiralis is rooted in the loam, and sends 

 up its sword-like leaves and its corkscrew-like petioles to the sur- 

 face of the water, each producing a single flower destined to float 

 in company with innuraerous green circular disks of duck-weed, 

 and a dozen leaves of frog's-bit, each doing its best to take firm 

 hold of the water with its roots ; those of the duck-weed are simple 

 threads ; those of the frog's-bit generally tend downwards in an 

 oblique direction, and are thickly fringed throughout with lateral 

 fibres, making them look like minute bottle-brushes of rather un- 

 usual proportions ; imagine small water-beetles treading the water 

 in an orderly and business-like manner, and now and then rising 

 to the surface like pigmy water-balloons, each with a bubble of air 

 annexed to his posterior extremity : he is the manufacturer of his 

 own gas : imagine half-a-dozen other water-beetles crawling de- 

 liberately, belly upwards, among the duck-weed, and add a few 

 smaller living creatures floating, or walking, or darting in the water 

 just as fancy or instinct guides them, and you will have a tolerably 

 correct notion of the sort of aquarium in general use amongst us 

 Bowerbankians, and into the depths of which we gazed with 

 boundless and unwearying satisfaction. Next witness the arrival 

 of a quadrate pickle-bottle, with a wet string twisted three or four 

 times round its neck and once or twice across its wide mouth, this 

 transverse portion of string serving as a handle by which to carry 

 it : the boy who brings this recommends the contents as being 

 " prime stitlers, all cocks." We take his word, and carefully 

 pouring off the superfluous water, empty the living contents of the 

 pickle-bottle into our aquarium. 



Success is neither certain nor immediate : my feelings at Deptford, 

 where all my manual acquaintance with the aquarium was gained, 

 have many times been cut to the quick by finding the sticklebacks 

 chevying one another for days and nights round and round the 

 lozenge-glass, until they died apparently from sheer exhaustion ; 



