CHAPTER XI 



THE DESTINY OF A BLUE SHAEK 



OIV September twelfth I met a Great Blue 

 Shark in the prime of life. A famous ichthyolo- 

 gist writing of the length of life of fish, says that 

 *' most of them grow as long as they live, and ap- 

 parently live until they fall victims to some stronger 

 species." By this criterion the blue shark whose path 

 crossed mine on this September day could easily 

 lay claim to a century, with excellent hopes of at 

 least a millennium. But theories are always better 

 when halved, so we will be safer if we suppose that 

 my shark was born in July, 1877. That allots him a 

 reasonable span of years, satisfies the verities of 

 generalizations, affords no chance for contradic- 

 tory proof of the mensal details and makes the 

 splendid creature my contemporary. There is a 

 record of a blue shark within ten miles of my birth- 

 place so we have considerable in common. 



His recognition by binominal taxonomic ichthy- 

 ologists occurred a century earlier, one hundred and 

 nineteen years to be exact, when Linnaeus officially 

 named his great-grandfather, Glauca, as these 

 sharks had been appropriately called by fishermen 

 for hundreds of years before. In the course of time, 

 after a change or two, Prionace was offered as his 



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