6i 



have been caught, and they have given scientists a pretty fair 

 idea of the Hfe in the utter darkness of those cold depths. They 

 do not give me the impression that Hfe is especially easy down there, 

 and almost all the fishes are black, while Crustacea and others are 

 red. Blue is no colour of the moving life of the abyss. 



In any case, however, the Coelacanth just did not fit. Its scales 

 alone ruled it out, for truly deep-sea fishes have no need of 

 scales, certainly not scales like those of the Coelacanth. It is by no 

 means certain and not even likely that the fishes that live in the 

 depths, or their ancestors, went there to escape competition with 

 other fishes. My work has repeatedly shown the enormous 

 stretches that even small feeble fishes have colonised, and all the 

 evidence indicates that fishes tend to move and seek new places to 

 live, just like any other creatures. All the types we know from the 

 deeps are derived from ancestors who lived in waters of ordinary 

 depth, and though most deep-sea fishes are of course greatly 

 modified to suit the special conditions, all are clearly related to 

 surface forms, none of which are any markedly better equipped to 

 withstand 'competition' than the ancestors of the deep-sea forms. 

 In the depths bodies are soft, bones are light, eyes are enormous 

 or have become obsolete, and huge jaws are filled with long fangs, 

 often barbed. There is no valid evidence to support the idea that 

 any of them retired to the depths to escape competition. 



When the Coelacanth was caught, that haul of the trawl 

 brought up several tons of sharks. As is well known, the bag 

 (Cod-end) full of fish is hauled aboard by a winch hung up over 

 the deck, and the lower end opened by jerking a rope, when the 

 fishes cascade into a heap on the deck. All but the most hardy are 

 squeezed to death in the net, certainly all at the bottom, and the 

 fall and the pressure of the heap above finish off the rest. Not 

 many fishes, perhaps occasionally an odd shark, are ever alive. 

 It is further characteristic that when deep-sea fish come up to the 

 surface, even without being squeezed in a net, most die long before 

 they even reach the top of the water. It so happened that the 

 Coelacanth was at the bottom of the pile with which he was 

 caught, and it was some time before that great weight above, 

 mainly sharks, was hauled away. At the end of all this the Coe- 

 lacanth was still so much alive that it snapped viciously at the 

 hand of the captain, who had been called to examine this strange 



