Free Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould Page A

forms of indoor natural display, from fern cases to aviaries to floral arrangements. But he devoted his opening chapter to the greatcraze that defined his decade of the 1850s—the establishment of marine aquariums in almost any home coveting a cachet of modernity. “I commence,” Hibberd writes, “with the Aquarium, which, for its novelty, its scientific attractions, and its charming elegance, deservedly takes the first place among the Adornments of the House.”
    Aquariums seem so humble in concept and so common in occurrence—astaple of your dentist’s office or your kid’s bedroom—that we can hardly imagine an explicit beginning, or a concept of original excitement and novelty. In fact, the aquarium had a complexly interesting and particular birth during the mid-nineteenth century, and then enjoyed (or endured) one of Victorian Britain’s most intense crazes of popularity during a definite interval in the 1850s. I do not,of course, claim that this invention marks the first domestic display of aquatic organisms. The owner of any respectable Roman villa could look down upon the animals in his fishpond. Similarly, the simple bowl had allowed, also since classical times, the contemplation of a fish or two in the more direct, edge-on, eye-to-eye orientation (through glass, or some other transparent medium that did notalways come easily or cheaply before the last few generations).
    But these precursors are not aquariums in the technical sense, for they lack the defining feature: a stable community of aquatic organisms that can be viewed, not from above through the opacity of flowing waters with surface ripples, but eye-to-eye and from the side through transparent glass and clear water.
    A fishbowl presentsa temporary display, not a stable community. The water quickly goes foul and must be changed frequently (engendering the amusing and frustrating problem, so well remembered by all childhood goldfish enthusiasts, including yours truly, of netting your quarry for temporary residence in a drinking glass while you change the water in his more capacious bowl—a process that can keep Grumpy the Goldfishgoing for a while, but surely cannot sustain a complex community of aquatic organisms). The concept of an aquarium, on the other hand, rests upon the principle of sustained balance among chemical and ecological components—with plants supplying oxygen to animals, fish eating the growing plants, and snails (or other detritus feeders) scavenging the wastes and gobbling up any algal film that might growon the glass walls. Western science did not discover the basic chemistry of oxygen, respiration, carbon dioxide, and photosynthesis before the late eighteenth century, so the defining concepts scarcely existed in a usable way before then. The aquarium represents but one of many practical results for this great advance in human knowledge. To quote Shirley Hibberd again: “The Aquarium exemplifies,in an instructive manner, the great balance of compensation which, in nature, preserves the balance of equilibrium in animal and vegetable life.”
    A few naturalists, before the invention of the aquarium, had managed to keep marine organisms alive for considerable periods in indoor containers—but only with sustained and substantial effort (entrusted to domestic servants, and therefore reflectinganother social reality of the times). For example, Sir John Graham Dalyell, a Scottish gentleman with the euphonious title of Sixth Baronet of Binns (and a day job as a barrister to enhance the alliteration), maintained marine animals in cylindrical glass vessels during the early nineteenth century. But he kept only one animal in each jar and had to change the water every day, a job allocated tohis porter, who also lugged several gallons of sea water from nearby ocean to baronial home at least three times a week. Sir John did enjoy substantial success. His hardiest specimen, a sea anemone named “Granny,” moved into her jar in 1828 and