Page:The American Boy's Handy Book edition 1.djvu/72

With a dip-net, made of an old piece of mosquito-netting, what fun it was to explore the spaces between the logs of the rafts in front of the old saw-mill! and what curious creatures were found lurking there! Little gars, whose tiny forms looked like bits of sticks; young spoon-bill fish (paddle-fish), with exaggerated upper lips one-third the length of their scaleless bodies; funny little black cat-fish, that looked for all the world like tadpoles, and scores of other creatures. Under the green vegetation in those spaces they found a safe retreat from the attacks of larger fish.

If a constant supply of fresh water can be kept flowing in an aquarium, or the water constantly aërified by agitation, the Fig. 48.Globe and Pump. ordinary misshapen tank may be run successfully. The glass globe, the most unnatural of all forms for aquariums, can be utilized in this way. There used to be in the window of a jewelry store, in an Ohio town, an ordinary glass fish-globe, in which, lived and thrived a saucy little brook trout. Brook-trout, as most of my readers know, are found only in cool running water, and will not live for any great length of time in an ordinary aquarium. In this case, an artificial circulation of water was produced by means of a little pump run by clock-work. Every morning the jeweller wound up the machine, and all day long the little pump worked, pumping up the water from the globe, only to send it back