The Aquarium Venture
One may not doubt that, s‘oodiow, (:uud
Shall come of Water and of Mud : • And, sure, the reverent eye must seo A Purpose in Liquidity.
W HEN Rupert Brooke wrote his poem describing • V V the fishy hopes and fears of a heaven that lies somewhere beyond space and time, he was, of course, drawing largely on his imagination, but it is surprising with what accuracy he foreshadowed the conditions obtaining in that luxurious, if necessarily circumscribed, fishes' paradise which some ten years afterwards took shape in Regent's Park. The inhabitants of the Zoo Aquarium are not, perhaps, without their peculiar vexations in those clear, sanded rock-pools over which one who is " omnipotent and kind " presides. The craw- fish squabble horribly at meal-times, and it may be that the rock-cod never quite get used to the great. window at the side of their pool through which those monstrous apparitions, men, are perpetually goggling at them ; but, beside the one tremendous fact of sanctuary—for nowhere is nature quite so ready with baleful devices of pursuit and death as in rivers and the sea----such slight inconveniences as these arc inconsiderable.
Even, however, if the Aquarium fish are not over- concerned with imagining themselves in a sort of ante-room to paradise, it is certain that many of them quickly come to look upon man as a god rather than—as he once was—merely another mouth to be avoided. The sapphirine gurnards' affection for their keeper. is really quite touching ; apparently it does not follow that a fish is stony-hearted simply because it is cold-blooded. (Carp, indeed, as those who have kept them in ornamental waters are aware, can be readily persuaded to feed from the hand ; and I myself knew an octopus, owned by a boatman of Crete, which had been trained to retrieve coal and other spoil of wrecked ships from the sea-bottom. In telling the full story of this 'remarkable cuttle-fish, however, I have never yet been believed, and there seems no reason why I should be now.) Within three months of the day they were taken from the sea the Aquarium gurnards had become as tame as cats. They would cat out of the keeper's hands and then suck his fingers. They would dart up to the surface in a stir of silvery foam, jostling for the favour of being stroked, or, better still, lifted clean out of the water into the strange excitement of the air. With their glowing coppery undersides and fins like blue-edged butterfly wings no creatures could be more entertaining to watch, and few more friendly. It is of some significance, too, that while it has required centuries of man's tact and patience to accustom a dog or a horse to his company, here are fish that have come, as it were, straight out of the beginnings of creation and settled with the utmost ease into the new ways. The sea-bed is about the only place upon which man has not yet been able to set his indelible mark of " culture."
The lung fish, indeed—which travelled from Africa embedded in a mud-filled tobacco tin—is positively antediluvian, and it is much more of a revelation to watch him feeding, in his polite way, out of the keeper's hand than to trail round a musty museum looking at skeletons of extinct monsters. A visit to the Aquarium might, in future, well constitute a part of every child's education in elemental biology, for as I overheard a girl exclaim several times with particular reference to the axolotl— that reptilian nightmare out of the past, " To me there don't seem to be no sense in them kinder fishes at all." She had a suspicion, I think, that the axolotl is nothing but a rather murky joke of the Creator's : but the mere fact of such an unholy-looking creature's existence could hardly fail to stir the least lively imagination in unaccus- tomed ways.
The underwater world is still, however, fathoms deep in mystery, and we might as well confess that what intrigues us most at the Aquarium is simply the unique and often comical view we get of fresh and salt-water life. Here, when the keeper throws a handful of paradisal grubs—actually horse's heart—into their pool, is a fine opportunity for the fisherman to study the table-manners of trout from a new angle. Here the little striped coral.
fish, black and blue, orange and blue, for all the world like opposing football teams, flicker about as brightly as butterflies in the summer grasses, or, seen from above, gleam an unimaginable deep violet when they catch the light, till one is quite sure that not even the plumage of birds can rival the colours of the sea. And after all, this must be so, for with fishes the brilliance increases till it is actually light—phosphorescent, or a row of electric lamps carried on each side. And in every case, from the revolt- ing mud-coloured salamander—who is as good as dead except when he is eating—to the tiny transparent glass fish, the lovely angel fish or the silver fish with his back redder than blood—the one predominant reason for all this range of colour is that only garbed thus is life in these unfamiliar regions possible for its inhabitants. Will the fact that there is no longer any necessity for simulating coral, weeds, or a sandy sea-bed eventually modify the colours and shapes of these Aquarium dwellers ? Already fish which arrived as confirmed vegetarians have been induced to fall in with the prevailing fare of heart, prawns, mussels or water-fleas, and in the well-aerated water—. the sea-water comes, by the way, from the Bay of Biscay– every species is as cheerful-looking (if one can conceivably call a creature with chronic pessimism in its eye cheerful) as a fish could be. It is a fact, too, that the mortality among Aquarium fish is relatively far lower than amoi captive beasts and birds. Here, the oldest fish—whose age is definitely known—is a eat-fish, of thirty-five, and although the longevity of fishes is a subject which has not yet been exhaustively gone into, fish are doubtless very long-lived creatures when they live unassailed by the foes of their natural environments. A friend solemnly, assures me, for instance, that he once knew an old lady in Oxford who kept a shrimp alive in a wash-basin for seventeen years, which would feed out of her hand when she called.
Here in the Aquarium at Regent's Park is a venture which, though it was launched only in 1924, has already justified its existence in a dozen ways. Many of us would like to see it enlarged till, being capable of accommodating the denizens of deepest oceans, it custed the rest of the Zoo altogether. Treated irrrely as an entertainment, it gives better value than any other section. Fish seem to have such humorous faces—perhaps because they are so often like uncomplimentary caricatures of people we know.
HANIISH MACLAREN,
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