Page:Sea and River-side Rambles in Victoria.djvu/88

69 CHAPTER IX.

THE AQUARIUM.

is something highly satisfactory to the Naturalist in the reflection that science has taken rapid strides within but a few years, and in no department more so than in Marine Zoology,—here, where but a brief period back all was little better than conjectural, there is now ocular demonstration, not only of the many creatures inhabiting the ocean, the one dependent on the other, but also of their habits, minute structure, and mode of living. From our childhood up we had been accustomed to see and have Gold and Silver Fishes in globular glass bowls, but the pleasure was in almost every case a temporary one, the inhabitants dying from the exhaustion of that free oxygen which had existed in the water, but which had all been absorbed, and its place taken by carbon, — before a fresh supply could be given by renewing the water. Collectors have long had their glass bottles wherein to convey to their study such creatures as they desired more nearly to cultivate the acquaintance of, but here too the duration of life was but brief, and soon they had to be transferred to a bottle of Goadby if their preservation was an object. No wonder then that it became a matter of such importance to obtain the means of preserving in health and brilliancy of colour such creatures as we wished to cultivate, and with whose economy we were almost entirely unacquainted. How