OCCASIONAL DEATH — INSTRUMENTS 27 



in it ; it should be well agitated frequently, and 

 soon you may put in, cautiously at first, your 

 animals, and every thing will be right again. 



Occasional Death. — It will still be needful to 

 exercise a watchful supervision of the collection. 

 It must be remembered that both the animals and 

 plants are not in their natural circumstances, and 

 that a certain amount of violence is done to their 

 habits. Death, which spares them not at the 

 bottom of the sea, will visit them in the Aquarium; 

 and hence the vessel should be occasionally looked 

 over, searched, as it were, to see if there be any of 

 the specimens dead. If the plants show an orange 

 hue in patches, they must be taken up, and the 

 diseased parts cut clean away. Dead animals 

 must be at once removed, or contamination will 

 soon result. The eye will soon recognise the indi- 

 viduals, and will miss the familiar forms ; but you 

 must not too hastily conclude that an animal, 

 which you have been accustomed to see playing 

 about, is dead, because you have not observed it 

 for some days, and cannot find it. Probably it 

 has secreted itself in some corner or crevice, whence 

 it will emerge in a day or two. Still such a cir- 

 cumstance should excite your vigilance. 



Instruments. — For removing dead specimens 

 or the like, a pewter spoon bent up to a right 

 angle, with the shaft tied to a slender stick, is very 

 useful. You can, if you please, make a more 

 elegant affair of it. Two or three simple sticks or 

 rods, some of them widened, spade-like, at the end, 

 are also useful for pushing the specimens to any 

 required point. And one or two small nets made 

 by stretching a bit of lace or muslin over a ring 

 of wire, fastened to a rod, will serve to catch and 



