Page:Sawdust & Spangles.djvu/285



Every prominent showman has had some venture into which he has put his whole heart. Nothing in my career touched and moved me like the great New York Aquarium enterprise. Into this I not only put a fortune—more hundreds of thousands of dollars than were ever put into anything of the kind before or since—but I also invested the ambitions of my life.

I was inspired by a profound desire to promote the interests of natural science in what appeared to me its most picturesque and attractive field—the marine world; and everything concerned in this mammoth undertaking exercised a strange fascination over me. All commercialism vanished, and I was as true and devoted a student of the wonders which I had collected as was the most erudite scientist that had ever looked upon that strange assemblage of creatures from the depths of arctic and torrid oceans. Rh