ations of a
generation.

V. THE MARINE BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT NAPLES

THE AQUARIUM

MANY tourists who have gone to Naples within recent years will recall
their visit to the aquarium there among their most pleasant experiences.
It is, indeed, a place worth seeing. Any Neapolitan will direct you to
the beautiful white building which it occupies in the public park close
by the water's side. The park itself, statue-guarded and palm-studded,
is one of the show-places of the city; and the aquarium building,
standing isolated near its centre, is worthy of its surroundings. As
seen from the bay, it gleams white amid the half-tropical foliage,
with the circling rampart of hills, flanked by Vesuvius itself, for
background. And near at hand the picturesque cactus growth scrambling
over the walls gives precisely the necessary finish to the otherwise
rather severe type of the architecture. The ensemble prepares one to be
pleased with whatever the structure may have to show within.

It prepares one also, though in quite another way, for a surprise; for
when one has crossed the threshold and narrow vestibule, while the gleam
of the outside brightness still glows before his eyes, he is plunged
suddenly into what seems at first glimpse a cavern of Egyptian darkness,
and the contrast is nothing less than startling. To add to the effect,
one sees all about him, near the walls of the cavern, weird forms of
moving creatures, which seem to be floating about lazily in the air, in
grottos which glow with a dim light or sparkle with varied colors. One
is really looking through glass walls into tanks of water filled with
marine life; but both glass and water are so transparent that it is
difficult at first glimpse to realize their presence, unless a stream of
water, with its attendant bubbles, is playing into the tanks. And even
then the effect is most elusive; for the surface of the water, which
you are looking up to from below, mirrors the contents of the tanks so
perfectly that it is difficult to tell where the reality ends and the
image begins, were it not that the duplicated creatures move about with
their backs downward in a scene all topsy-turvy. The effect is most
fantastic.

More than that, it is most beautiful as well. You are, in effect, at the
bottom of the ocean--or rather, at the bottom of many oceans in one. No
light comes to you except through the grottos about you--grottos haunted
by weird forms of the deep, from