As one recovers his senses and begins to take definite note of things about him he sees that each one of the many grottos has a different set of occupants, and that not all of the creatures there are as unfamiliar as at first they seemed. Many of the fishes, for example, and the lobsters, crabs, and the like, are familiar enough under other conditions, but even these old acquaintances look strange under these changed circumstances. But for the rest there are multitudes of forms that one had never seen or imagined, for the sea hides a myriad of wonders which we who sail over its surface, and at most glance dimly a few feet into its depths, hardly dream of. Even though one has seen these strange creatures "preserved" in museums, he does not know them, for the alleged preservation there has retained little enough of essential faciès of the real creature, which the dead shell can no more than vaguely suggest.
Here, however, we see the real thing. Each creature lives and moves in a habitat as nearly as may be like that which it haunted when at liberty, save that tribes that live at enmity with one another are here separated, so that the active struggle for existence, which plays so large a part in the wild life of sea as well as land, is not represented. For the rest the creatures of the deep are at home in these artificial grottos, and disport themselves as if they desired no other residence. For the most part they pay no heed whatever to the human inspectors without their homelike prisons, so one may watch their activities under the most favorable conditions.
It is odd to notice how curiously sinuous are all the movements, not alone of the fish, but of a large proportion of the other forms of moving life of the waters. The curve, the line of beauty, is the symbol of their every act; there are no angles in their world. They glide hither and yon, seemingly without an effort, and always with wavy, oscillating gracefulness. The acme of this sinuosity of movement is reached with those long-drawn-out fishes the eels. Of these there are two gigantic species represented here--the conger, a dark-skinned, rather ill-favored fellow, and the beautiful Italian eel, with a velvety, leopard-spotted skin. These creatures are gracefulness itself. They are ribbon-like in tenuousness, and to casual glance they give the impression of long, narrow pennants softly waving in a gentle breeze. The great conger--five or six feet in length--has, indeed, a certain propensity to extend himself rigidly in a fishlike line and lie immovable, but the other species is always true to his colors, so to say--his form is always outlined in curves.