The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium

The mysterious world beneath the ocean’s surface and its inhabitants have captivated humanity for centuries—the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and ancient Chinese all kept fish in their homes to observe and admire. But it was not until the nineteenth-century invention of the aquarium that the deep was truly domesticated, offering the curious a chance to create an indoor exotic sea world, in miniature.

In The Ocean at Home, Bernd Brunner traces the development of the aquarium from the Victorian ...