Shirley Hibbard

“ Motion I know to be no test, because algæ-spores dance through the water gayly till they find a resting-place, and, when the aquarium was first filled, it was by dancing they at last found where to pitch their tents, and cease their nomad wanderings. But they all work together to sustain the balance, and the law of "give and take" prevails among them—the stentor devours the oscillatorise, rotatoria, and monads, and the hydras swallow all; every darting speck is a tomb wherein some smaller speck of life is to be buried, and life thus prospers on the decay it is itself undergoing. ”

“ They inspire oxygen and expire carbonic acid, just as a man does, and every other living creature that moveth upon the face of all the earth. Is it within the reach of human power, even when reason, imagination, and fancy combine together as a bold triad to look direct upon a fact, to appreciate that principle of terrestrial life by which animal and vegetable organisms reciprocally labor to maintain the balance of atmospheric purity? The carbonic acid given off by the animal is poison to it, if it accumulate while the supply of oxygen is cut short. ”

“ If God so ordains that life shall be constantly soaring from the tomb, if the story of the Phœnix ceases to be a fable, need man, the victim of doubts and fears, ever fail in his trust of that blessed promise, that "this mortal shall put on immortality, and this corruptible shall put on incorruption?" Science may fix his mind on the appreciation of God's wisdom and power as he reads the handwriting of the Almighty in Nature, but through faith in another revelation must we hope to exclaim, triumphantly, "O death, where is thy sting? ”

“ Even then I learn something from their death if I leave the vessel in the hands of Nature. Death has no sooner spread his black banner over my household gods than life of another kind arises to confound him, and the microscope reveals to me myriads of animals and plants, and organisms that seemingly occupy an intermediate place between the two great kingdoms, rioting upon the wreck that death has made. ”

“ God has ordained such a wealth of organic forms that, wherever the conditions of life are found, life takes possession of the spot, whether it be the bottom of the ocean, the dripping roof of a cave, the expanse of the viewless air, or the mimic lake I call an aquarium. ”

“ WHEN man looks upon Nature, he sees everywhere the records of death's work among the representatives of creative energy. The stratified rocks are but the tombstones in the great graveyard of the world ”

“ Forthwith the dead stones become alive with greenness, the glass walls assume the semblance of a meadow, the milky hue of the water disappears as the earthy particles it held in solution subside, and the light that streams through it takes a tint of greenness. ”

“ Therefore I see why, in the tank that has been left alone, plants have cast anchor on the glass walls, the brown pebbles, and the gray blocks of sandstone-rock. My fishes breathe and breathe. If their numbers are properly proportioned to the area they occupy, they will never exhaust the water of oxygen, never render it fetid with carbonic acid, so long as one necessity of vegetable life—light—is allowed to use its active influence to paint the plants green, even as oxygen gives a sanguine hue to the gills or lungs of the fishes. ”

“ If the infusion of life into countless forms, each in itself perfect, needed nothing less than Almighty power, it needed Almighty power too to complete the scheme in the institution of dissolution; and the grim king of terrors, before whom the bee and the sparrow tremble, perhaps, not less than man, became co-worker with God by a wise and beneficent appointment ”

“ While these devour the banquet death has spread for them, while forests of confervoid threads rise in silken tufts like microscopic savannas, Nature is passing portions of the ichthyic débris through her laboratory, and the very source of life for which they pined and perished—oxygen—is poured in in large measure, and the corruption is quickly changed to sweetness. ”

“ Monas, euglena, uvella, cryptomonas, gonium, and other wondrous infusoria, may be detected as constituents of the cloudy mass while it lasts, called into being because the conditions of the tank were such as they required, as if life in embryo were everywhere locked up until the moment came for its liberation, and some particular circumstance was the talisman to set it free or, if we consider created forms to be marshalled in grand procession, may we not expect that every tribe will hurry to its appointed place the instant that a door is opened? ”

“ See again in this case in which death has been very busy (for plants of large growth soon perish in the absence of sunshine, and occasional attendant accidents will carry off some of the finny pets) , how life has been equally active on the other side, for such an aquarium will be a hundred times richer in those spontaneous growths we have already spoken of, and visible forms of infusoria and true zoophytes will abound, and every class will be more fully represented, down even to the twilight monad. ”

“ Of the once sportive fishes some portions have become air, other portions have become water, but the chief of their bulk lives already in the vegetation which hides their grave, and the moving throng with which that vegetation is peopled. God's purpose, in the working of the laws in obedience to which these changes have taken place, is manifestly to keep ever true that balance of life and death of which He holds the beam in His own hands. ”

“ Though this paper must have an end, there is no end to the teaching of the aquarium. It is a watery microcosm of living and dead wonders, and we need not marvel that the balance of life and death may be observed in its succession of changes, because all the physical forces of the universe are locked up within a single bead of dew, and all the functions of organic creation are comprised in the economy of a monas termo. ”

“ Microscopists have long been at war, but without bloodshed, as to the place to be assigned to certain organic forms which are hidden from our common eyesight. While the war goes on as to whether desmidiaeæ and diatomaceæ be animal or vegetable, or both, let facts suffice us here in the study of the aquarium. Does an animal exhale carbonic acid? Yes. Well, here are plants or animals, concerned in keeping up the balance, which exhale oxygen, and their name is legion. ”

“ Do you not see that the chief teaching of geology—the piling of stratum upon stratum, the conversion of disrupted rock and decayed plant and animal into rock again—is here exemplified in the history of a domestic toy, which contains already one example of stratification in the silence of watery submergence? ”

“ A tank which has been fitted with loam, pebbles, and plants of the brook and river, will, if left undisturbed for three years, be in this state. Those plants will all have decayed, but there will be an abundant spontaneous vegetation. The accumulations of that short period will have settled into a close mass, almost as hard as stone; and if fishes have died in the mean time, and have not been removed, their bones will be found overlaid with hardened mud, just as we find them in the old red sandstone, or the chalk, or the carboniferous rocks, and shall we not call them our own fossils? ”

“ We believe that not the airiest particle of earth, atmosphere, or water, nor the most minute globule of condensed moisture, nor the most infinitesimal point of meteoric dust, can ever be lost, at least during Time, from the fabric of the universe. My fishes tell me that the oxygen they absorb from the water they again return to it, but in another form. ”

“ To those plants, the carbonic acid, which the fishes expire day and night, is as essential as oxygen is to the animal economy, and thus, without introducing a single scrap of any living plant, the balance is sustained, and death seems to be kept at a distance. If at first I threw in a tuft of callitriche or anacharis, or any other true aquatic vegetable, oxygen would be supplied abundantly ”

“ It is when we leave the principles and attempt to classify the details of the scheme that we become bewildered. The smooth revolution of the fly-wheel and the noiseless oscillation of the piston convince the unprofessional observer of a great engine that mechanical motions are possessed of poetry ”

“ The fishes soon exhaust the water of its oxygen, and though the water attempts to renew its supplies by absorption from the atmosphere, the compensation is too slow, the fishes come gasping to the surface, and in a short while perish. ”