25 



According to Miss Latimer, she had very considerable difficulty 

 in persuading the taximan to consent to having the fish in his 

 taxi at all, even though she had brought along old bags to put 

 on the floor on which to rest any fish. The taximan was so reluc- 

 tant that he stood aloof and distant while she and a native struggled 

 and wrestled to get the creature into the vehicle. 



One may sympathise with that taximan, while smiling at the 

 incongruity, refusing to transport what was the most valuable 

 zoological specimen in the world, though none of them knew it 

 at that time. There are many fishes in South African seas that 

 to anyone not an expert would appear much more strange than a 

 Coelacanth, and, as has been explained, museum directors in 

 South Africa have so many fields to cover that they just cannot be 

 experts in every branch of science. 



Getting this heavy fish to the Museum was one thing, what to 

 do with it there was another. Miss Latimer had nothing in which 

 to keep it, but first had a hunt through her pitifully few reference 

 works to see if she could get some idea of what it was. But she 

 found nothing; indeed, from its fantastic nature it would have 

 been almost a miracle if she had. So, after making a rough 

 sketch and taking measurements, she borrowed a hand truck, and 

 with the native boy took it to a taxidermist who did that work for 

 the Museum. (The 'Museum' did not even have a handcart of its 

 own.) She also asked an expert amateur photographer to take some 

 photographs, which he did, but for some reason the whole film 

 was a failure. 



According to Miss Latimer, the bony plates of the head, the 

 scales, and the fins made her feel it was a Ganoid fish, probably 

 a Lung-fish of some type, but she had no means of verifying this 

 and relied on hearing from me. She told the taxidermist to keep 

 all the parts he cut away in case they were important, and this 

 he did; but by the 27th December 1938 they were in such an 

 appalling state that not having heard from me by then Miss 

 Latimer agreed to his urgings that they should be disposed of. 

 Miss Latimer states that when she rather timidly ventured to tell 

 the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum, the late 

 Dr. Bruce-Bays, what she thought about this fish, he scoffed at 

 her views, and crushed her by saying in rather harsh terms that 

 'all her geese were swans', and that if she wanted to keep the fish 



