Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/34

22 of the famous Zoölogical Society of Amsterdam, Natura Artis Magistra. The building itself is situated on the broad avenue margining the Zoölogical Garden, and is decidedly an attractive one, although outwardly as cold and dignified as the typical municipal building, with its Roman architecture and its central temple-like structure. Its large size, about a hundred yards in length, has been of great advantage in the arrangement of the details of the interior, permitting the decorative use of columns, arches, and cornices without noticeable sacrifice of space or the appearance of overcrowding. The main corridor, which the visitor enters after he has ascended a broad white stairway, is wide and stately, its marble walls and floor diffusing the light entering from the large glass faces of the aquaria. The corridor is about fifty yards in length, and the aquaria, twenty in all, are arranged on either side, the largest measuring about thirty feet. They have been admirably designed to display their collections of living forms; fishes are notably present, and on every hand their movement is incessant, with gleams of color and changes of outline as they sweep to and fro. The critical observer is particularly impressed with the great number of fishes which have been kept successfully in a single tank; among them he recognizes the prominent forms occurring along the North Sea coasts turbot and sole, ling, cod, rays, and flounders—even the herring and mackerel, to which confinement is usually most fatal. A collection of fresh-water fishes is not lacking, including a number of American forms, for which the director has been indebted to Mr. E. G. Blackford, of New York city—black bass, amia, and catfish—the latter strongly contrasting in size with their European cousin in an adjoining tank, the giant Wels of the Danube. From the extreme end of the aquarium room the visitor passes into a smaller hall, circular in outline, which contains over a score of table tanks displaying forms of attractive fresh-water fishes and salamanders; it is brightly lighted and pleasingly decorated with a marble-tiled floor, fringed by palms and ferns. From this room an entrance leads, on the one hand, into a spacious auditorium, which is made of use in courses of popular lectures, and, on the other hand, by a few marble steps, into a well-lighted museum containing in several rooms a collection of dried or alcoholic preparations of the typical forms of invertebrates and lower vertebrates.

The operative portion of the aquarium includes well-lighted corridors extending on either side of the main hall; the pathway along which the visitor passes has been sunken below the walls of the tanks, whose shelving sides can thus be more conveniently reached by the attendants. A series of darkened corridors next lead into the vaulted basement containing the large storage tanks.