THE YOUNG SCIENTIST. 
135 
connected by an intestinal canal; hence 
his name, Pohjgastrica, or many stom- 
ached. In these views he has not been 
followed by later observers, and it is 
probable he was misled, partly by push- 
ing the process of reasoning from the 
analogies of higher animals much too 
far, and partly by the imperfection of the 
glasses he employed. 
How a Marine Aquarium was Started. 
THE late W. A. Lloyd, Curator of the 
Aquaria in the Crystal Palace at 
Sydenham, England, gives the following 
graphic sketch of how he set up several 
marine aquaria in his early days. The 
account shows how difficulties which are 
at first sight insurmountable, may be 
overcome by thoughtfulness and labor. 
The following is his story : 
There was a time, nineteen or twenty 
years ago, when not only shillings and 
sixpences were not to be thought of by nje 
to be spent in aquarium matters, but 
pennies and halfpennies had to be laid 
out carefully. So, with artificial sea- 
water made from salts prepared by a 
Holborn chemist — which salts he kindly 
gave me, because I gave him the receipt 
for mixing them — I set up small aquaria 
in wide-mouthed glass bottles costing a 
penny or twopence each. The sea I had 
never seen, and was not so presumptuous 
as even to hope to see it, and I knew of 
no one living by the sea who could send 
me marine animals. But that daunted 
me not, for I used to sally forth at dead 
of night where heaps of oyster shells were 
thrown by day from street oyster-stalls 
in Smithfield and St. John's Street, and 
bring them home. The oysters devoured 
in such poor neighborhoods were not the 
genteel little smooth " natives," eaten at 
luncheon bars, but big rough "com- 
moners," with bold foliations of the up- 
per shell, and deeply ribbed on the lower 
one, and in and below these hiding places 
I could find many little sea anemones of 
several species, some hopelessly smashed, 
but others quite perfect (having been pro- 
tected by the strong projections of the 
oyster shell), and unharmed by rain or 
other fresh water. 
It was quite a mistake of the late Dr. 
George Johnston, of Berwick-on-Tweed, 
to say as he did, in his " History of British 
Zoophytes," that sea anemones are in- 
stantly killed by immersion in fresh 
water. 
The species I found thus were Actino- 
loba dianthus, Sagartia viduata, S. troglo- 
dytes, S. hellis, and >S^. elegans, but very 
seldom the common Actinia mesemhry- 
anthemum. 
All these I used to pick ofl the shells 
I with never- wearying patience and care, 
and drop them into the factitious sea- 
water, and transfer them to my bottles, 
to which they adhered, and made them- 
selves happy. 
I used to feed them with little morsels 
of oyster-flesh which I found adhering to 
the insides of the shells, and when the 
water in the bottles would become offen- 
sive from the effects of the food, because 
the quantity of fluid was too small to hold 
enough oxygen in solution to decompose 
the dead animal matter fast enough, I 
poured the water from the little bottles 
into a great earthenware foot-pan covered 
with a sheet of glass to keep out dust, 
and standing in a dark corner of the 
room. The foot-pan was so very large in 
comparison with my small bottles, that 
the emptying of them periodically into the 
pan did not interfere with the purity of 
the water in the latter, so that from it I 
immediately re-filled the bottles one at a 
time, on successive days. The water in 
the foot-pan on the floor below thus ef- 
fectually counteracted all tendendy at 
going wrong in the bottles on the window 
sill above. 

— Certain timbers of great durability, 
when framed together, destroy each 
other. A large black walnut log, framed 
into a cypress gallows-tree, under shelter, 
both perfectly sound, in two years were 
discovered so badly decayed as to prevent 
the use of the cypress again. The walnut 
sawed off remained sound ten years, 
while the lower end of the gallows- 
post, where cypress was joined into 
cypress, remained as sound as the day 
it was put together. 
