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Except among the select few, generally either enthusiastic boys or London mechanics of an inquiring mind, who keep fresh-water aquariums and replenish them from ponds and brooks at "weekends," few persons outside the fancy either see or know much of the water insects, or are aware, when floating on a summer day under the willows in a Thames backwater, of the near presence of thousands of aquatic creatures, swift, carnivorous, and pursuing, or feeding greedily on the plants in the water garden that floats below the boat, or weaving nests, tending eggs, or undergoing the most astonishing transitions of form and activity, on or below the surface.
Fawns, as it had been for him, and as Maggie and Fanny Assingham had both attested, was out of the world, whereas the scene actually about him, with the very sea a mere big booming medium for excursions and aquariums, affected him as so plump in the conscious centre that nothing could have been more complete for representing that pulse of life which they had come to unanimity at home on the subject of their advisedly not hereafter forgetting.
There, too, may be seen the remnants of the great tanks, fed with water brought through earthen pipes from the Fountain of Albe, wherein he kept the fish whose habits he observed. Professor Planchon thinks that he had salt-water tanks likewise; and thus he may have been the father of all "Aquariums."
In fact, the lungs themselves in all the higher animals are merely the swim-bladders of fish, slightly altered so as to perform a new but closely allied office. The mud-fish is common enough in all the larger English aquariums, owing to a convenient habit in which it indulges, and which permits it to be readily conveyed to all parts of the globe on the same principle as the vans for furniture.
Let us have a game at cards at ecarte, if you please. You deal. I ask for cards. I lead the deuce of clubs. . . . What? there is no deuce! Deuce take it! What? People WILL go on talking about their neighbors, and won't have their mouths stopped by cards, or ever so much microscopes and aquariums? Ah, my poor dear Mrs. Candor, I agree with you.
When removed from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums.
It was situated on the northeastern shore of Nahant, within a stone's throw of broken and bold rocks, where the deep pools furnished him with ever fresh specimens from natural aquariums which were re-stocked at every rise of the tide.
Leg spines of somewhat the same sort are found in the common English gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one years must have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along suspiciously by their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace or the polyonymous South Kensington building.
"Oh, lots of places," Colin answered, "circuses and aquariums and places like that. I even saw a troupe of them on the stage once, playing ball. They put up a good game, too." "Those weren't the real fur seals," Hank replied; "what you saw were the common hair seals, an' they're not the same at all. You can't keep fur seals alive in a tank!"
Living-rooms, library, halls, billiard-room, were obstructed with "scientific" paraphernalia; hundreds of glass fruit jars, filled with earth containing the whitish, globular eggs of the Rose-beetle, encumbered mantel and furniture; glass aquariums half full of earth, sod, and youthful larvæ of the same sinful beetle lent pleasing variety to the monotony of Scott's interior decorative effects.
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