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AQUARIA: THEIR PRESENT, PAST, AND FUTURE. 
By WILLIAM ALFORD LLOYD, 
Manager of the Crystal Palace Aquarium. 
E IGHT Y-SIX years ago — in the year 1790 — there might 
have been seen trudging along the streets of Edinburgh 
an “old blue-coated serving-man,” carrying an earthenware 
pitcher or jar, of three or four gallons capacity. That pitcher 
contained sea-water for the marine aquarium of Sir John 
Graham Dalyell, Bart., who thus employed a man, or probably 
a succession of men, from the time he began aquarium-keep- 
ing till he finished at his death in 1851 — a period of sixty-one 
years. The jar was sent to the sea to be filled twice or thrice 
weekly ; but averaging it at five times a fortnight, and allowing 
four miles for each double journey from Great King Street to 
the sea and back, that amounted to 39,650 miles from the year 
1790 to the year 1850, which was an enormous and perfectly 
needless expenditure of force, expressed in time and money, 
even although the results of Sir John’s investigations were 
given to the world in five such important quarto volumes as 
his “Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland,” 1847-8; 
and his “ Powers of the Creator displayed in the Creation,” 
1851-8. 
Dalyell’s mode of operation, as told to me by his sister 
Elizabeth, in two letters dated 1860, and printed in the 
“Zoologist” of Nov. 1873, vol. viii. Second Series, pp. 3757-8, 
was as follows : — He kept his living marine animals, consisting 
of the lower kinds below fishes, in a number of glass cylindrical 
jars, of various sizes and proportions, and with usually one animal 
in each. The water in these jars he changed every morning, 
“ often twice a day, if he perceived the smallest fragment 
amongst it, wiping and washing the glasses very clean.” He 
then threw away the water so used, and replenished it from the 
earthenware jar with the water got from the sea. At one time I 
should not have termed this aquarium-keeping at all, because of 
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