51 

 a.m. and worked at the animal until 6. Then I cleaned up and 

 went for a four-mile walk over the hills. On my return I would 

 write up my observations from the notes, and when I left for 

 College at 8.30 a.m. my wife took these and typed them. On my 

 return at lunch-time I would go over them again, and she would 

 retype during my absence in the afternoon. On my return at 

 5-5.30 p.m. I would start in again and usually worked until 

 about 10 p.m. I do not suppose I averaged four hours' sleep any 

 night during the week, but slept late on Sundays. It was the same 

 old mixture my life had always been, turbulence and trouble, only 

 more intense. We had no social life, business and financial affairs 

 took a back seat, and our food reached its destination over and 

 between sheets of manuscript. We had no conversation, no 

 thoughts, no ideas nor eyes, for anything except Coelacanth, all 

 day and all night. We could never forget it, certainly not with that 

 smell. It was an equally severe strain on my wife, especially as a 

 child was due in about three months' time. 



I had no compunction about doing the whole investigation my- 

 self — I had earned it and I could do it, but I worked on that 

 stuffed and mounted creature with very mixed feelings. It was a 

 wonderful thrill to be the first to see the finer details of a skull 

 of a living Coelacanth, and yet the loss of all the soft parts was a 

 perpetual tragedy that clouded the investigation. I pushed this 

 aside, for it was not irremediable and only made me determined 

 to find more and whole specimens. There must be others some- 

 where, and at the back of my mind 'a cloud no bigger than a man's 

 hand* had formed, the forerunner of the project that came to over- 

 shadow all else in my life — the hunt for the home of the Coelacanth. 



The work progressed slowly. The structure of the skull was 

 the most important part, and I decided to open the whole of the 

 one side. It was done very, very slowly and carefully, every 

 fragment of skin and bone kept in place. By that time I had 

 received from all over the world all the latest publications on 

 Coelacanths and related fishes, and it was wonderful to uncover 

 a tiny bone and then after a hunt through all the pictures and 

 drawings to find the same or its equivalent in some fossil of a 

 fish that had lived several hundred million years before. In some 

 cases the structures were exactly alike; it was indeed fantastic, 

 this peculiar feature of Coelacanths, their unchanging nature. 



