6s 



evidence of Coelacanths all along our coasts. My wife and I 

 walked many hundreds, probably thousands, of miles in all, 

 showing the picture and telling the story to people of all classes, 

 callings, race, and colour. But we got nothing of any value. 

 Before the war ended it came to look as if the Coelacanth could 

 not possibly live normally anywhere near where this one had been 

 caught, and that it must have been a stray. There must surely be 

 others. The problem of finding out where they lived became even 

 greater. 



If my deduction that the Coelacanth lived about reefs was 

 correct, it was clearly such a predator that it ought to take a 

 baited hook, or would at any rate be likely to be seen by fisher- 

 men sometimes somewhere. If that was the case, why had its 

 existence not been reported before ? That could be the result of 

 many diflPerent causes. Coelacanths might, for example, live only 

 about reefs where nobody fished. That might be because nobody 

 lived on the shores where such reefs were, or the reefs might be 

 far out at sea, as margins to banks where there was not enough 

 dry land for anyone to live. It might even be that those reefs were 

 constantly lashed by rough seas or powerful currents, or both, so 

 that nobody could ever fish there at all. This would, of course, 

 mean that if the Coelacanths lived in such a place they would 

 never have been caught by any human agency, and would not 

 easily be tracked by any means except that of going and finding 

 the exact spot. It would certainly be a formidable task to cover all 

 such places. On the other hand, it was equally possible that they 

 had been and were being caught regularly in some area, but by 

 primitive peoples to whom they would just be fish and who would 

 not realise their significance. And in what part of the shorelines of 

 the world were any or all of such conditions more likely to be 

 found than in East Africa? Nowhere in all the temperate and 

 tropical oceans was there at that time so great an area whose 

 marine fauna had been so little investigated and which was so 

 little known as East Africa. The whole area is full of reefs, rocky 

 and coral reefs, some enormous, many hardly known. Add to this 

 that the set of the current from north of Madagascar is always 

 southwards. I could see no reason why the Coelacanth should not 

 live normally in some remote and probably uncivilised part of that 

 vast area. As I surveyed all the facts and evidence, it seemed very 



