Monaco—Home of the Ocean's Story
Mysteries of the Deep Are Shown at "Bottom of the Sea" in World's Smallest Country
By FRANCIS DICKIE
Part of the Marine Collection and the Nets and Traps of the Late Prince of Monaco, Who Utilized His Gambling-Casino Fortune to Pursue His Deep-Sea Studies
I spent nearly an entire day recently in the company of hundreds of different kinds of the ocean's creatures, at the "bottom of the sea," situated in the smallest country in the world, which covers only about three square miles.
Built upon a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, Monaco is the home of the wonderful Museum of Oceanography, which is one of the outstanding places of interest in Europe, and which not only houses a unique collection of live sea creatures, but a still rarer gathering in bottles of forms of ocean life from immense depths, first made known to the world by the findings of the late ruler, Prince Albert I, who devoted the better part of his years to scientific research.
In the deep, dark basements of the museum has been constructed a reproduction of the bottom of the ocean in great tanks, where are collected hundreds of peculiar fish, great turtles, octopus, tiny sea spiders and other sea life, strange and rare for human eyes to look upon as they move in their natural element. From a spacious entrance hall you descend until you come into a long passageway dimly lighted by electric globes, hidden within the shells of sea urchins, which throw a faint rosy light along your pathway. On either side of several long passageways are glass tanks. As you start along the dusky corridor, the impression of being a part of the ocean's bed is strongly felt. In the long line of tanks there are hundreds of strange and rare crabs, sea anenome, and fish of vivid and varied hues, red, yellow and green predominating.
The tanks are lighted from above. The first sight that startles the visitor is, however, not the fish, but apparent jets of smoke pouring from tiny tubes among the imitation rocks in all the fish tanks. These
