Do Not Mess With Fish 235,

and you thought fish were fun!

well they certainly were in Victorian days when 'aquarium mania' swept society, and he is the man responsible for it, the man who arguably gave us the word 'aquarium', the Englishman Philip Henry Gosse, in his 1853 book A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, the term “vivarium” was used interchangeably with “marine aquarium”, but one year later the die was cast for the latter variant in his book,

 The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea, as Gosse stated in its pages, the word should be “neat, easily pronounced and easily remembered” the term “vivarium” was designated for tanks containing mainly snakes and amphibians; “aqua vivarium” was a step in the right direction, but the term was not yet perfect, Gosse understood “aquarium” as the neutral form of “aquarius”, 

 and the aquarium was born, of all Gosse’s works, the most successful was The Aquarium, in which he described his observations of coastal life and a year after establishing the first public aquarium at the London Zoo, in the book he describes how to collect, keep and maintain the aquarium, in those days there were no shops like Kingfisheries where you could just wander in a walk out almost literally with a ready stocked marine aquarium, 

 all of the wonders of the tide pools had to be collected by the aquarist, leaving all of that aside,

 the book was a roaring success,

 not only for the Victorian passion to keep marine creatures, but the book was wonderfully illustrated in colour with high-quality illustrations, which were quite rare at the time, which played an important role in the success of most of Gosse’s books, his wife Emily, a talented artist trained by popular landscape painter John Sell Cotman, who made the drawings for the stunning plates found in The Aquarium, although her images proved so integral to the book’s popularity, she is entirely uncredited on its pages, her husband’s name inscribed below the images instead, while it was general convention at the time for picture credits in scientific publications to default to the text’s author, one does wonder why Henry failed to mention his wife’s contribution at all in his preface, despite finding room to acknowledge the lithograph printers,

 one can not underestimate the collecting mania of the time, as Henry D. Butler retrospectively wrote about the British aquarium mania in his book The Family Aquarium — "The aquarium was on everybody’s lip. The aquarium rang in every body’s ear. Morning, noon, and night, it was nothing but the aquarium", the magazine Blackwoods even recommended that children should not see the book, "otherwise there would be no peace and quiet in the house until the children were finally allowed to have an aquarium", but alas nowadays it is the computer and games in similar devices that are king, if you found any of the above of interest I thoroughly recommend this book,

 by Bernd Brunner, The Ocean At Home, and no I am not on commission! It is just that it is a great read.