Living Silver 



Lemon sole had the same kind of hps as men. If the evolutionary 

 theory of natural selection was true, it was therefore highly prob- 

 able that they used their mouths for some similar purpose. But 

 what could it be? They obviously didn't purse their lips over 

 pencils. 



Jan thought through the various uses of the human mouth. Most 

 of them were quite ridiculous when applied to the lemon sole. He 

 tried to imagine their flattened hidden bodies shouting to one an- 

 other from the rock-bed. Yet men did use their mouths to speak. 

 And it was still more ludicrous to think of the fish kissing one 

 another in the submarine coldness of the Faroes and the northern 

 North Sea, Whatever kind of sex life was enjoyed by the lemon 

 sole, he was sure that kissing played no part in it. He was baffled. 

 Any other explanation seemed even sillier than his first guesses. 

 There was nothing for it but to wait and hope for inspiration. And 

 then, one day as he was sitting at breakfast, he noticed his land- 

 lady's baby. It had just been washed and was lying back comfort- 

 ably, very pink among the overhanging bulges of soft white pillow. 

 A concentration so intense that it might have been mistaken for 

 vacancy had lulled it beyond consciousness of the outside world. 

 It was obviously very happy. And then Jan knew. Of course, that 

 was it. Lemon soles did suck. 



Later he discovered that they fed on the worms, the sedentary 

 worms which combed a delicately microscopic mixture of life and 

 death from the lowest layer of sea water. Animals that floated 

 alive near the surface sank when they died, their bodies disinte- 

 grating. And there were so many of them that their bodies created 

 a steady ooze of organic material falling on the sea-bed. It was this 

 rain of food that served the worms, and the worms fed the lemon 

 sole. In spite of the needs of humanity, the worms did not want 

 to be eaten. They built houses to defend themselves against the 

 predations of fish, either by cementing sand grains together or by 

 a chemical secretion of calcium carbonate through the agency of 

 glands on their skin. When danger threatened they could retreat 

 into these tubular hovels, sometimes blocking the entrance almost 



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