* ♦ 
The Marine Aquarium. 
235 
rolling grandeur, gentleness, and power, chain the mind to it; and while 
intellect strives to master some of the problems its phenomena suggest, the 
imagination and the fancy find therein inexhaustible poetry, indescribable 
beauty, and all the elements of fear, and joy, and wonder, and repose. 
Besides its own individual life, which compels us to invest it with some of 
the attributes of a creature gifted with purpose and volition, and capable 
of both love and hate to man, it holds another life within it, which 
the mind reaches after, which the hand reaches after, and, like another 
and a new creation, demands that man should stand in the midst and 
name the creatures. The r fresh sea breeze—the calm expanse of blue, 
shading into mists flaked with distant sails on the horizon—the towering 
moorland and the grandeur of the cliffs, that show the scars of 
centuries of storm and battle—the music of the breakers, following in 
quick succession along the yellow strand, maintaining there a constant 
line of whitening foam—the vastness of the expanse, and the nothing¬ 
ness of man in the presence of it;—these do not suffice us as we 
stand upon the shore, yearning after knowledge of the creation that is 
hidden in the depths. There is one comfort: the conquest of the earth, 
given to man as a high and blessed privilege, extends to the sea also ; 
it is to him a storehouse of wealth, to be sought in danger; and a 
storehouse of wisdom, to be explored in reverence; every one of its 
strange people offering a fresh lesson of the infinite goodness and 
infinite power of the Source of all things. 
It is in this search that we betake ourselves to the aquarium, and find it 
of priceless value, because it places before us for daily observation, in the 
quiet retirement of our homes, things born and nurtured in the depths of 
great waters, and enables us, in places far away, still to believe that the sea 
is near us in the tiny imitation of it we have set up for our amusement. The 
marine aquarium ranks as much higher than the river aquarium as the sea 
itself transcends in glory the smallest of the hillside rivulets that hurries 
towards it as its final home. The range of subjects it embraces is a hundred¬ 
fold more extensive and wonderful than the river tank can ever be, and it 
provides occasion for the study of creatures that lie out of our ordinary path 
of observation, and which charm us by their novelty and beauty no less than 
by their structure and habits and several phases in the order of created life. 
Therefore the setting up and managing of a marine tank is a higher task than 
that of furnishing one with fluviatile subjects, and, like all other such enter- 
