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Aquarium   /əkwˈɛriəm/   Listen
Aquarium

noun
(pl. E. aquariums, L. aquaria)
1.
A tank or pool or bowl filled with water for keeping live fish and underwater animals.  Synonyms: fish tank, marine museum.






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"Aquarium" Quotes from Famous Books



... their seven lives. They visited one of the big liners (Sandy knows the Scotch engineer), and were conducted from the bottom of the hold to the top of the crow's-nest, and then had luncheon on board. And after luncheon they visited the aquarium and the top of the Singer Building, and took the subway uptown to spend an hour with the birds of America in their habitats. Sandy with great difficulty pried them away from the Natural History Museum in ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... on several occasions has led that portion of the public immediately about the Happy Family into the erroneous impression that I was Mr. Barnum explaining his five hundred thousand curiosities. On the present occasion we found several visitors of the better class in the room devoted to the Aquarium. Among these was a young lady, apparently about nineteen, in a tight-fitting basque of black velvet, which showed her elegant figure to fine advantage, a skirt of garnet silk, looped up over a pretty Balmoral, and the daintiest ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow

... she emptied water and fish into an aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble rabbit had been ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... a manatee," went on Betty. "Don't you remember the big creatures we saw in the New York aquarium ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope

... artificial light could deceive them, and they clung with closed wings to leaves and branches, only now and then displaying their full glory in a sleepy protest. There were scores, hundreds of them, and the diners passed in review of the spectacle like country visitors before the glass tanks of the Aquarium. A strident shriek sounded as a gorgeously caparisoned peacock preened himself; others were discovered here and there, brilliant- hued specimens, voicing ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... the Wardian Case has lately been presented in the Aquatic Plant Case, or Parlour Aquarium, due to the ingenuity of Mr Warington, and which has for its object, as its name indicates, the cultivation of aquatic or water plants. It may be described as a combination of the Wardian Case and the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various

... first unaware of what lay before him. Chin on palms, he sat upon the iron rim of a former aquarium and stared morbidly through the open door at the checkered departing back of Della. It was another who saw treasure in the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National Gallery; to temper the grandeurs of Westminster by the introduction of the Aquarium, with Mr. Hankey's Tower of Babel in the near distance; to guard against any too-imposing effect which the outline of the Houses of Parliament might have by covering them with minute ornament, sure to be blackened and corroded into ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... the Aquarium, which I hope the reader will visit at the earlier hours of the day. Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the ages of fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from its torpor in the bottom of its tank, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... captive salamanders was observed by one of us. The salamanders were maintained in a seven-gallon aquarium, the floor of which was covered with soil, mosses, liverworts, certain flowering plants, and pieces of rotten fir log. The salamanders were placed in the terrarium in September, 1956, July, 1957, and October, 1958; one individual lived 13 ...
— Natural History of the Salamander, Aneides hardii • Richard F. Johnston

... Agassiz's Natural History Akin by Marriage American Antiquity Aquarium, my Architecture, Domestic Art ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... are now spending their vacation on or near the sea-shore, and have a good opportunity to study the wonderful habits of animal and vegetable marine life. Therefore I have undertaken to throw out a few plain hints as to the management of a salt-water aquarium, in which these interesting forms of nature can be ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... that hollow, nose under for the most part, and the air smelt wet and muddy, like that of an emptied aquarium. There was a second hill to climb; I saw that much: but the water came aboard and earned me aft till it jammed me against the wheel-house door, and before I could catch breath or clear my eyes again we were rolling to and fro in torn water, with the scuppers ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling

... the sun. Coral formations of endless design and shape come to view through the limpid spectrum, forming a perfect submarine garden of wondrous beauty. Through the shrubs, branches, ferns, and sponges of coral, the brilliantly colored fish of the Southern seas sport like goldfish in some immense aquarium. ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman

... Romans,' Dr. Smith's 'Notes on the Corinthians,' and Dr. Robinson's 'Notes on the Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians,' just saved the character of the place, in spite of a girl's doll's-house standing above them, a marine aquarium in the window, and Elfride's hat hanging ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... additions to the Zoo is a wonderful Aquarium, where all sorts of strange fishes and sea-creatures can be seen swimming about in natural surroundings, lit from above. From the huge wicked-looking octopuses with their snake-like feelers, to the tiny sea-horses with heads very like those of the knights in chess ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... Very soon she began to speak of the creatures about her. "Marmosets, my dears," clutching one of the little chatterers under the table; "they make a deal of noise, but like most noisy people's talk it doesn't mean much. This is my aquarium; the sea-horses are most odd, don't you think? And here," coolly pushing back her sleeve and plunging a plump, white arm into the water, "this, you know—just a frog! See how tame! And people call them ugly! ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the sea-side has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the sea-side are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the Heavens, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... were to subtract from the sum of the intelligence of an animal that which it owes to nature or inherited knowledge, the amount left, representing its own power of thought, would be very small. Darwin tells of a pike in an aquarium separated by plate-glass from fish which were its proper food, and that the pike, in trying to capture the fish, would often dash with such violence against the glass as to be completely stunned. This the ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... and Betty Martin!" cried Cameron, "I'll take it all back, girls! It's a real studio after all—and this is the real thing! Louis, do you think she's seen the Aquarium? ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... "it amuses the fishes, you know." Beamish's was, as Gilks had said, another name for the Shellport Aquarium—a disreputable place of resort, whose only title to the name of Aquarium was that it had in it, in an obscure corner which nobody ever explored, a small tank, which might have contained fishes if there had been any put into it. As it was, the last thing any one went to Beamish's for was to ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed

... fishing; the whole country is then a perfect network of streams. Every rice field is a shallow lake, with countless thousands of tiny fish darting here and there among the rice stalks. Every ditch teems with fish, and every hollow in every field is a well stocked aquarium. ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... such a brow and bend of the head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first time in those thirteen years, there rose before her mind a vivid picture of her mother, her father, her brother, their flat in Moscow, the aquarium with little fish, everything to the tiniest detail; she heard the sound of the piano, her father's voice; she felt as she had been then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... had given me a book called The Aquarium, written by Philip Henry Gosse (father of the present poet, essayist, and critic), illustrated with pictures of sea-anemones and other marine creatures done from his own drawings in color, and so well done that nothing ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at least perceptible entity. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that it may come upon, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself, a hundred times a day, against a wall of glass, always mistaking it for water. Do you realise that your answer will have the effect—I do not say of making me cease from that moment to love you, that goes without saying, but of making you less attractive to my eyes ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... aquarium in Naples. There are even sharks and squids. When a squid (an octopus) devours some animals it's a ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... children had to amuse themselves in the house, and, truth to tell, they were not sorry for one whole day to settle various little matters which had been neglected during the fine weather. One of these was the aquarium. This kept them well employed; but when on the following morning they found the rain still falling, and the heavy, ragged clouds gave no promise of the sky ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... put a net over the bowl or aquarium in which you keep them, otherwise as soon as they are able ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley

... been ladling out water at this spring," I said, trying to keep my lips from trembling. "I wouldn't be at home any place else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But don't ask me to stay here and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel. For ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... past the edges of the curtains and splashed on the deck in dipperfulls. And it hid everything beyond the torn and tattered Union Jack at the bow. Looking through the dripping windows was like looking through the glass side of an aquarium, for beyond it was a solid sheet of water. Steve gazed anxiously from chart to compass under the electric lights and eased ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour

... thought they would, very much, and a little later, with their mother and Aunt Lu, they were in the aquarium. All around the building, which was in the shape of a circle, were glass tanks, in which big and little fish could be seen swimming about. In white tile-lined pools, in the middle of the floor, were larger fish, alligators, turtles and other things. ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Aunt Lu's City Home • Laura Lee Hope

... swinging doors, many obsequious schwitzars on the lookout for tips, many poor creatures sitting against the walls on dirty benches, desks and clerks, brilliant boots and epaulets of gay young officers who are telling tales of the Aquarium with great relish. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... and then when he felt hungry, to get a dinner or a luncheon fit for any fishy alderman. It must be a fine field for the naturalist, the ichthyologist, probably as fine as that round Bermudas' coral shores, as illustrated by the new aquarium at Hamilton. But I can hardly think that the fish of any other climate can compare for brilliancy of colouring and fantastic variety of shape with those captured on the Hawaiian coast and well displayed in the ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... them: tough as a shark is, they would willingly have risked life for a few raw mouthfuls of the same. Somehow, though the sea was still and the wind light, the brig gave a sudden lurch and dipped up one of the monsters, who was quite secure in the shallow aquarium between the gunwales. He was soon despatched, and divided equally among the crew: some ate a little, and reserved the rest for another day; some ate till they were sick, and had little left for the next meal. The Spaniard with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... it; and when he was not up a tree with the boys in a daring hunt after bergamy pears, or wading barefoot in a shallow stream at the bottom of the garden catching water-beetles, caddis-worms, and other small cattle for a freshwater aquarium, he was generally carrying this child about the garden pickaback, or otherwise obeying her little behests, and assuring her of ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... man raised a hand and pushed back his hair, which was short but wavy. It was observed that he wore, doubtless in memory of his uncle, a mourning tie of grosgrain silk, replacing the piquant aquarium scene. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... study, as its inhabitants belong to the most curious and interesting of ocean and fresh-water creatures. Fishes alone are well worthy of close observation; and when to these are added odd little reptiles, queer shell-fish, and different classes of the wonderful zoophytes, an aquarium presents a constantly changing picture of ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... to permit fresh air to circulate around this pinewood box and to penetrate into it. The other was visible, placed directly opposite the porthole built in the wainscoting, but it was blocked up. For a long aquarium occupied the entire space between the porthole and the genuine window placed in the outer wall. Thus the light, in order to brighten the room, traversed the window, whose panes had been replaced by a plate glass, the water, and, lastly, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... boulders, like little bears. The wind blows strong. The streams run naked under the eye of the sun, exposing clear and yellow every detail of their bottoms. In them there are no deep hiding-places any more than there is shelter in the land, and so every fish that swims shows as plainly as in an aquarium. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... much tobacco as a cigar. And, leaning back against the trunk of one of the big old walnut trees in the yard, he gazed toward the house, where the open window nearest him splashed with colour like a bright and crowded aquarium. "To her, anyway!" he added, with a slight remorse, remembering that his mother had frequently ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... regions are starfish of still other shapes, some with a dozen or more arms. I took one with thirteen rays and placed it temporarily in a pool aquarium with some large anemones. On returning in an hour or two I found the starfish trying to make a meal of the largest anemone. Hundreds of dart-covered strings had been pushed out by the latter in defence, but they seemed to cause the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... was waiting in vain, a last hope made him glance toward the white building of the Aquarium. Freya had frequently mentioned it. She was accustomed to amuse herself, oftentimes passing entire hours there, contemplating the life of the inhabitants of the sea. And Ferragut blinked involuntarily as he passed rapidly from the garden boiling under the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... much better than the morning. Edna carried off Miss Shelton to the Aquarium, and left Bessie to drive with her mother; and as Mrs. Sefton was very talkative and in excellent spirits, Bessie had to maintain her share of the conversation. They found visitors on their return, and Bessie had to pour out the tea, and help entertain them, as Edna was tired from ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... The Aquarium, containing, in some of its compartments, specimens of the animal and vegetable life of the sea, and, in others, those of the fresh water, was richly worth inspecting; but not nearly so perfect as it might be. Now I think we have a right to claim, in a metropolitan establishment of this kind, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a German, among other sensational feats, such as breaking coins with his fingers, used to flex his muscles and break a dog-chain that had been fastened round the biceps of his right arm. While he was performing at the Aquarium, in London, he issued a challenge. Sandow, then a youth without reputation, accepted the challenge, went upon the stage, defeated him, and, since Samson's act had been the talk of the town, thus brought himself into ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... aquarium must surely be fishes, eh, Saffy?" said the father to the bright child, walking hand in hand with him. It was Josephine. Her eyes were so blue that but for the association he would have called ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... hanging over them throws reflections as of the sea upon them; one might suppose them victims drowned in an aquarium. And withal the sacred lamps, the altar crowded with strange Shintoist symbols, give a mock religious air to this ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... the briny deep," exclaimed the gasping savant, "I am compelled to decline your friendly offices, but I tender you my scientific gratitude; and, as a return favour, I beg, with this my last breath, that you will accept the freedom of my aquarium, and make it ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... element in his otherwise highly correct appearance. He wore his faded fair hair very short, and his greyish yellow beard was trimmed in a point. His fat hands were incased in tight white gloves. His pale eyes looked quietly through his glasses and made one think of the eyes of a big fish in an aquarium when it swims up and pushes its nose against the plate-glass front of the tank to ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... of the place entirely by having around the walls a series of large glass aquaria, with as many different kinds of fish swimming about as it is possible to get; something on the order of the interior of the aquarium in Battery Park in New York. Paint the ceiling to represent the surface of the water as seen from below. Have seaweed and kelp in place of ivy, and a fish net or two caught up in the corners of the room, with here and there a starfish or a crab—not too many, ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... walked, in more senses than one; went round to fetch her little girls, as she had promised, from that newly opened delight of children, the Brighton Aquarium; staid a little with them, admiring the fishes; and when she reached home, and found David Dalziel in the drawing-room, met him and thanked him for bringing her the newspaper. "I suppose it was on account of that obituary notice of Mr. Roy's child," said ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... the face, he came alongside of them, peering up at their windows. A face showed at one of them, spectacled and bearded, gazing motionlessly through the panes with the effect of a sea-creature in an aquarium. It vanished and reappeared at the end door of ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... while in the rear fragments of intestinal membranes showed like lacework, like some guipure of white flesh. And on the highest tier in this sanctuary of gluttony, amidst the membranes and between two bouquets of purple gladioli, the window stand was crowned by a small square aquarium, ornamented with rock-work, and containing a couple of gold-fish, which were ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... "and a Russian woman once did try to rob a Queen's Messenger in a railway carriage—only it did not happen to me, but to a pal of mine. The only Russian princess I ever knew called herself Zabrisky. You may have seen her. She used to do a dive from the roof of the Aquarium." ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis

... ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with another,—though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual lighting. When ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... structure of glass and of stone, looking over a scrap of enclosed city garden, and furnished in black and white, relieved by splashes of brilliant color. Aunt Maude hated the green parrot and the flame-colored fishes in the teakwood aquarium. She thought that Eve looked like an actress in the little jacket with the apple-green ribbons which she wore when she ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey

... green velvet. Except for the pink path we were in a world of green—green moss, green ferns, green tree trunks, green shadows. The little light that reached from above was like that which filters through the glass sides of an aquarium. ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... kindness and consideration with a consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw's ethical utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... remarkably hopeful one—was an engagement to deliver a long series of lectures on marine natural history throughout the north and centre of England. These lectures were an entire novelty; nothing like them had been offered to the provincial public before; and the fact that the newly-invented marine aquarium was the fashionable toy of the moment added to their attraction. My Father was bowed down by sorrow and care, but he was not broken. His intellectual forces were at their height, and so was his popularity as an author. The lectures were to begin in march; my Mother was buried on 13 February. It ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse



Words linked to "Aquarium" :   vivarium, fish tank, Marineland, tank, fish bowl, goldfish bowl, marine museum, fishbowl, storage tank



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