Page:The Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet.djvu/18

8 plants and animals contribute mutually to each other’s support in the preservation of the purity of the air.

What happens when we put half-a-dozen gold fish into a globe? The fishes gulp in water and expel it at the gills. As it passes through the gills, whatever free oxygen the water contains is absorbed, and carbonic acid given in its place; and in course of time the free oxygen of the water is exhausted, the water becomes stale, and at last poisonous, from excess of carbonic acid. If the water is not changed the fishes come to the surface and gulp atmospheric air. But, though they naturally breathe air as we do, yet they are formed to extract it from the water; and when compelled to take air from the surface, the gills, or lungs, soon get inflamed, and death at last puts an end to their sufferings.

Now if a gold-fish globe be not over-crowded with fishes we have only to throw in a goodly handful of some water weed—such as the Callitriche, for instance—and a new set of chemical operations commences at once, and it becomes unnecessary to change the water. The reason of this is easily explained. Plants absorb oxygen as animals do; but they also absorb carbonic acid, and from the carbonic acid thus absorbed, they remove the pure carbon, and convert it into vegetable tissue, giving out the free oxygen either to the water or the air, as the case may be. Hence, in a vessel containing water plants in a state of healthy growth, the plants exhale more oxygen than they absorb, and thus replace that which the fishes require for maintaining healthy respiration. Any one who will observe the healthy plants in an aquarium, when the sun