A new variant has been added!

Nicobar Pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica) © BioDivLibrary

It hatches from blue, dark, difficult, extravagant, green, long, new, offshore, orange, quiet, shy, small, spectacular, visible, and white eggs.

A new variant has been added!

Pink-necked Green Pigeon (Treron vernans) © BioDivLibrary

It hatches from adaptable, alien, black, blue, coastal, colored, female, green, male, many, much, open, orange, other, pink, social, strange, striking, vocal, and yellow eggs.

... “an aquarium mounted in handsome rustic-work” (1857).

From an example among dozens of popular books about aquaria published during the British decade of Aquarium-Mania.    

There are as many stories about who invented the aquarium, as authors who have written about it! That there is a question at all is because when the first public aquarium opened in London in 1853, Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) declared himself the “inventor” of the aquarium. Less than a year later (1854) he authored a popular book on aquariums in which he explained everything there was to know about them, and his name became durably associated with the word.

Gosse did indeed create the word “aquarium” from a contraction of the earlier term “aquatic vivarium” and he helped stock the Fish House in London’s zoo. But initially, an aquarium is not a ‘place’ to visit, nor a ‘thing’. In fact it was thought of as a way of exploiting the properties of plant and animals to keep both alive without changing the water. In other words, an aquarium was first a demonstration of a principle about the physiological “balance” or equilibrium between the properties of plants and animals. Creating an aquarium was an experiment that anyone could do.

Today, with hindsight, it seems that this idea was very much dans l’air du temps. According to Rehbock (1980: 523), the concept first appears in a publication a couple of decades earlier. The French biologist Charles des Moulins (1798-1875?6) was experimenting with ways to keep small populations of invertebrates alive in his laboratory. Moulins described in a short publication how adding different sorts of plants and algae refreshed the water in his “petit étang factice” (his little imitation pond; Des Moulins, 1830: 261). He reported that the animals in his container remained alive and healthy for many months when kept in this way.

Years later numerous other persons would claim to have “invented” the aquarium. Among them are two women:  Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794-1871) and Anna Thynne (1806 - 1866). Their claims were mixed-up with national rivalries and each woman had her own defender in the scientific academies.  Villepreux-Power would seem to be a more serious contender based on her publication record, than the socialite, Anna Thynne. However Villepreux-Power’s “cages”, used to study the argonaut, were simply modified containers that allowed her to make better observations of the living animal and did not use the aquarium principle at all. Neither did Mrs. Thynne’s vase of corals aerated daily by her maid for three years and on display in her London salon. Then there were other examples of sealed cases being used to transport plants, like Nathaniel Ward’s cases.

It was actually a British chemist (R. Warington, 1807-1867) who worked out the chemistry of the aquarium principle by about 1850. After numerous experiments, he realized that the oxygen produced by the plants supported the animals, and that the conditions would remain stable as long as the number of animals was not too high.  His official publication appeared in 1851.

But all this is mostly known from retrospective analyses of the bibliographic record (Rehbock, 1980: 525). Rehbock argues that new discoveries about the chemical nature of physiological processes like respiration and growth discovered at the end of the 18th century, did not appear to interest British naturalists until after publication of Justus von Liebig’s work in “physiological” chemistry (1840). Rehbok’s thesis is that von Liebig discussed these processes in terms of how they could benefit farming and animal husbandry, which made the chemistry seem more relevant to naturalists who wished to keep animals alive for study. Leibig actively promoted the idea of chemical equilibrium being part of the balance of nature. Aquariums became de facto evidence for this balance.