1 89 



account giving detailed instructions for the care and preservation 

 of a Coelacanth, so as to enable the maximum to be obtained from 

 investigations. 



Among the general letters we received in all this time were 

 many different types. The clerical staff had a fat file of letters 

 which they privately and irreverently termed the 'Crackpot' file 

 (which I did not see until later), in which they housed letters to 

 which that term could be applied. As in the case of the first 

 Coelacanth, there were many letters from apparently religious 

 persons of a certain type which came from virtually all English- 

 speaking countries. Some of these correspondents were really 

 shocked that a man like myself should so misuse his position as to 

 mislead the public by talking of millions of years. One man, whose 

 attacks editors had refused to print, published a denunciatory 

 pamphlet about my views. In some missives my worldly end and 

 my future in another sphere were vividly portrayed; I was told 

 that it would be better for mankind if people of my type had never 

 been born, and there were even threats of personal violence. One 

 good lady in Grahamstown called in some indignation with an 

 issue of a well-known paper from England, in which somebody 

 quite scurrilously 'Gave me blazes'. She expected I would write 

 to pulverise the author, and was surprised when I laughed and 

 said that I never replied to anything like that, nor would I permit 

 her to do so on my behalf. A day or two later she delightedly 

 brought me a further issue of the same journal in which somebody 

 else (in England) had pulverised the author. It generally happens 

 that way. 



An R.A.F. officer who had been at the Comores during the war 

 wrote to say that he hoped I would not be shocked at the tale, 

 but as food had been a problem at that time, depth-charges were 

 used to get fish. Many queer creatures came up that way, and 

 after seeing the picture of the Coelacanth he was almost certain 

 that there had been several in the catches they had made about 

 those islands. I need hardly record that I was not shocked by this 

 disclosure ; in fact, if he felt that way I wondered what his reac- 

 tions would be to what I could tell him. 



The descendants of a missionary who had lived near Mount 

 Kilimanjaro wrote from Germany giving a good deal of informa- 

 tion about flying-dragons they believed still to live in those parts. 



