Nor would any of them suit my plans of today. Their world is too vast. I should lose myself in their immensities, where life swarms freely in the sun. Like the ocean, they are infinite in their fruitfulness. And then any assiduous watching, undisturbed by passers by, is an impossibility on the public way. What I want is a pond on an extremely reduced scale, sparingly stocked in my own fashion an artificial pond standing permanently on my study table.
A louis has been overlooked in a corner of the drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardizing the domestic balance. Let me make this gift to science, who, I fear, will be none too much obliged to me. A gorgeous equipment may be all very well for laboratories wherein the cells and fibers of the dead are consulted at great expense; but such magnificence is of doubtful utility when we have to study the actions of the living. It is the humble makeshift, of no value, that stumbles on the secrets of life.
What did the best results of my studies of instinct cost me?
Nothing but time and, above all, patience. My extravagant expenditure of twenty francs, therefore, will be a risky speculation if devoted to the purchase of an apparatus of study.
It will bring me in nothing in the way of fresh views, of that I am convinced. However, let us try.
The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion--for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all-trades if you would make both ends meet--sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet iron and a trap to let the water out.
The makers express themselves satisfied with their work, a singular novelty in their respective shops, where many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough.
The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone.
What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water!
Smith and glazier are content with their work. I myself am pleased. For all its rustic air, the apparatus does not lack elegance. It looks very well, standing on a little table in front of a window visited by the sun for the greater part of the day.
Its holding capacity is some ten or eleven gallons. What shall we call it? An aquarium? No, that would be too pretentious and would, very unjustly, suggest the aquatic toy filled with rock work, waterfalls and goldfish beloved of the dwellers in suburbia.
Let us preserve the gravity of serious things and not treat my learned trough as though it were a drawing room futility. We will call it the glass pond.
I furnish it with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes.
It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation and quiet are the first conditions of success. Now the stocked pond will not be long in filling itself with gases unfit to breathe, with putrid effluvia and other animal refuse; it will become a sink in which life will have killed life. Those dregs must disappear as soon as they are formed, must be burnt and purified; and from their oxidized ruins there must even rise a perfect life-giving gas, so that the water may retain an unchangeable store of the breathable element. The plant effects this purification in its sewage farm of green cells.
When the sun beats upon the glass pond, the work of the water weeds is a sight to behold. The green-carpeted reef is lit up with an infinity of scintillating points and assumes the appearance of a fairy lawn of velvet, studded with thousands of diamond pin's heads. From this exquisite jewelry pearls break loose continuously and are at once replaced by others in the generating casket; slowly they rise, like tiny globes of light. They spread on every side.
It is a constant display of fireworks in the depths of the water.
Chemistry tells us that, thanks to its green matter and the stimulus of the sun's rays, the weeds decompose the carbonic acid gas wherewith the water is impregnated by the breathing of its inhabitants and the corruption of the organic refuse; it retains the carbon, which is wrought into fresh tissues; it exhales the oxygen in tiny bubbles. These partly dissolve in the water and partly reach the surface, where their froth supplies the atmosphere with an excess of breathable gas. The dissolved portion keeps the colonists of the pond alive and causes the unhealthy products to be oxidized and disappear.
Old hand though I be, I take an interest in this trite marvel of a bundle of weeds perpetuating hygienic principles in a stagnant pool; I look with a delighted eye upon the inexhaustible spray of spreading bubbles; I see in imagination the prehistoric times when seaweed, the first-born of plants, produced the first atmosphere for living things to breathe at the time when the silt of the continents was beginning to emerge. What I see before my eyes, between the glass panes of my trough, tells me the story of the planet surrounding itself with pure air.
