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from time to time that such and such animals named had been 
kept in this Regent’s Park aquarium, to which he gave the 
needlessly long name of 44 Aquavivarium.” This place was my 
own much loved and earliest place of Natural History studies, 
and in August 1853, 1, too, arranged a little domestic aquarium 
of my own — a fresh-water one. Later, in the same year, I set up a 
small marine one, or rather a series of little aquaria in glass jars, 
holding from half-a-pint to a pint each. Seldom has a student 
begun with such very small means as I then possessed, for my sea- 
water was compounded of salts purchased at a London chemist’s 
shop, and my animals were such little sea -anemones as I could 
find uninjured on oyster shells thrown into London streets. I 
was in earnest, however, and the difficulties I was so closely 
beset with, and they alone, enabled me to gain subsequent 
success. In the earlier books on aquaria — notably in Mr. 
Grosse’s two volumes, his 44 Devonshire Coast ” and his 44 Aqua- 
rium ” (the 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 summer proved ; and the 
second summer (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 suceess was to be attained 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 algae 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 the water was, and still is, turbid and warm, and sparsely 
inhabited by not healthy creatures. 
These good results were, however, obtained by accident and 
not design. The society possessed already a steam-engine, 
which pumped up water for the general use of its gardens, 
