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placeable, this had become a matter of personal honour, and before 

 I died I wanted to see it completely tied up and tidied away in its 

 proper niche in the halls of science. This desire was greatly in- 

 creased when I discovered that, after all, we had not yet got a 

 complete animal. That also I was determined to get or see made 

 available for science, and though tired of the tropics, I was quite 

 ready to go again, and as often as need be, now that this more than 

 encouraging discovery had been made. 



It had long been my ambition to catch a Coelacanth alive so 

 that the ordinary man could see it in an aquarium, and be given 

 the opportunity to look back to the kind of creature that lived 

 hundreds of millions of years ago. There is probably no other true 

 scientific story which has given the ordinary man so clear a vision 

 of what is meant by time, and to have a live Coelacanth on view 

 would round it off in a way that H. G. Wells would certainly 

 have appreciated. It was in one sense his idea of a 'Time Machine' 

 come true. 



There were many other things as well. Was there still another 

 species, the small one Hunt had mentioned?* In addition, the 

 startling difference from Latimeria observed in Malania raised 

 difficult problems. Was Malania really different, or was it just an 

 exceptional, perhaps extrerne, variant ? 



Any species reproduces itself with comparatively small varia- 

 tion between individuals, but I had long held the view that this 

 'mass production' would tend to weaken or slacken in the course 

 of time, that in a relatively broadly unchanging type like the Coela- 

 canth, while the general form remained constant, after long ages 

 there would be increasing variation in characters of lesser impor- 

 tance, like the position or size of the fins and other parts. There is 

 one curious, rather primitive, rare type of fish {Tetragonurus)^ 

 which is like this. Though it has been known for centuries and 

 odd specimens have turned up over almost the whole globe, com- 

 paratively few, less than thirty adults, have been found in all that 

 time. What is amazing is that hardly any two specimens agree in 

 minor characters, like fin counts, and to this day scientists do not 

 really know if there are a dozen species or only one. It will need 

 hundreds of specimens before this can be settled. 



• I have since come to believe that this is actually the Oil-fish (Ruvettus) 

 that the Comorans catch in the same way as the Coelacanth. 



