Which statement best connects the figure of Aquarius to the word aquarium?
adapted from What is an Aquarium?
by Shirley Hibberd
The term vivarium was first applied to the vessel containing a collection of specimens of aquatic life. The first vivarium of such a kind, on anything
like an large scale, was that opened to public exhibition in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens². Many naturalists had previously made
experiments to ascertain some certain method of preserving aquatic animals in a living and healthy state. The vivarium, which is the result of those
experiments, may be considered as an imitation of the means employed by nature herself in the preservation of the various forms of animal and
vegetable life which populate the oceans and the streams.
The vivarium is, therefore, no recent or sudden discovery, but a growth of years. Its present perfection is the fruit of many patient investigations, trials,
disappointments, and determinations to achieve success.
The term vivarium applies to any collection of animals-to a park of deer, a rabbit warren, a menagerie, or even a traveling show containing an
asthmatic lion, a seedy cockatoo, and a pair of snakes that are hourly stirred up with a long pole. For this reason, such a term could never convey the
very special idea of a vessel containing such specimens as form the stock of the aquarium. When this was felt, the prefix aqua was added, to convey
the idea of the water medium in which the specimens are immersed.
This invention led us to the word aqua-vivarium, a compound of too clumsy a character to remain long in use. It is the water that gives the collection
its special character, and water always reminds us of old Aquarius³, who treats us to an annual drenching from his celestial watering pot. Naturally
people wanted to give the place where they kept their confined watery companions Aquarius' name an aquarium. The term that referred to old
Aquanus stuck. Since it is better to follow than oppose what people want to call something, we'll leave the philological part of the question to the
intellectuals and adopt aquarium as the name for our collection of underwater creatures