Sa anes Soa Jil A Soe eee ea ig aE Iai ae eae | 
Se eee ee a ar ees 
1876.] ; Aquaria: Their Past, Present, and Future. 617 
latter having gone through two editions, 1853 and 1856, besides 
a recent reprint without the plates, which have been accidentally 
destroyed) — aquaria are associated in idea with conservatories, 
especially as to the growth of plants in each. This notion was 
very natural. Accordingly the Regent’s Park Aquarium was 
made virtually as a conservatory. But it was a diametrically 
wrong notion, as the first sammer proved; and the second sum- 
mer (1854) showed this still more conclusively; and the third 
(1855) yet more so, the evil being an accumulating one. It was 
then remembered, when too late, that marine and fresh-water 
plants and animals live in seas and rivers, where the temperature 
is much more restricted in range than that which obtains in the 
atmosphere. 
It was seen that success was to be obtained by representing 
these conditions of nature just named, and that to place such 
organisms in a glass house, where the rays of a summer's sun 
heated a mass of imprisoned air, was to kill the animals and to 
stimulate the plants to unnatural growth, or rather to cause them 
and some of the animals to be covered with a parasitic growth 
of the lower green alge, which obscured them. The errors of 
this earliest aquarium were strikingly shown by its solitary merit, 
the latter being its fresh-water division, occupying one side of 
the building, where the water coursed through the tanks in a 
constant stream, it being clear and cool, and peopled with an 
adequate number of healthy animals; while on the other side of 
the building, and in its centre, were the marine tanks, in which 
e water was, and still is, turbid and warm, and sparsely in- 
habited by not healthy creatures. 
These good results were, however, obtained by accident and . 
hot design. The society possessed already a steam-engine, which 
Pumped up water for the general use of its gardens, and it was 
à mere matter of course to connect the aquarium with this: 
engine, and allow the water (which chanced to be drawn from a 
pure source) to run through the fish tanks, and then be applied 
to ordinary purposes, drinking or other, for which its passage 
a through the tanks in no way unfitted it. I reasoned with the 
_ Society that if the sea-water tanks were similarly treated on 
Some such system as the fresh-water series, a correspondingly 
1 good result would be attained; and I pointed out that the same 
W governed both, because in the centre of the building were 
; Some isolated fresh-water tanks having no stream in them, sad 
were in a similarly ill condition as the marine tanks by 
