302 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



panicky, timid souls into a horrified terror. All of 

 these fears have about the same basis of truth; out 

 of seventeen hundred species of serpents living 

 on the earth today, less than one third are dan- 

 gerous; undoubtedly there have been a few men 

 who, at the same time, have been very bad men and 

 believers in evolution, and there is no doubt that, 

 since history has been recorded, a few authentic 

 cases of the attacks of sharks upon men have oc- 

 curred. To condemn sharks in general is like 

 never taking a taxicab because men have been run 

 over and killed by taxicabs. 



I have written elsewhere of individual sharks 

 I have met, but here we are concerned only with 

 their relations to the scheme of the shallow water 

 world. At Cocos, there weaved in and out above 

 me, occasionally coming down and curving around 

 the great coral pagodas, sharks of three species. 

 The white-finned and the island sharks were wan- 

 dering nomads of clearly vulturine habits, arousing 

 no fear among smaller or weaker fish, but always 

 on the lookout for a crippled or dead creature. 

 They were the dominant scavengers, and after we 

 had used dynamite, the sharks under water and the 

 frigatebirds above, cleared away every overlooked 

 specimen, no matter how small. 



These two kinds of grey sharks were four to 

 nine feet in length, and they swam slowly, with 

 wide lateral undulations of the head and body, 

 keeping rather a dull outlook from their yellow 

 eyes. The ability of the human imagination to see 

 what it thinks it ought to see is astonishing. As long 



