Living Silver 



whole backbone. It did not look in the least like the upturned and 

 badly made saucer that it would yet become when it was ready to 

 descend to the bottom and hide itself under sand. But, as these 

 larvae swam, pigment spots would concentrate, coagulate, on the 

 right side of their bodies. Their height would increase to a degree 

 that was out of all proportion to their growth in breadth. Finally, 

 then, a left eye would migrate round to the right side of the body 

 and there it would join the concentration of pigment granules that 

 was soon to become the upper surface of a flatfish. Then, after 

 three months of systematically indolent navigation, a tiny plaice 

 would be ready to sink down, indolent as ever, to the sea bottom. 

 It would lie there, and the shallow water would lie above it, and 

 it would move, too quickly perhaps for the flatfish it was supposed 

 to become, darting after the tiny crustaceans that were also com- 

 pressed laterally in the same way as itself, the amphipods, the first 

 cousins of what Jan called the freshwater shrimp. It would lie ; it 

 would dart ; it would fan itself leisurely ; but always it would be 

 gleaming upwards like an illuminated manuscript and always its 

 belly, opaque and white as the yellow cream of milk, deep cream 

 with a blue streak in it, would be spread close against the ground. 

 And the back, which was really its right side, would blaze with 

 two invisible eyes and a system of red dots. Through their bright- 

 ness they saw to it that the beast was unseen against its surface of 

 sandy bottom. The plaice, by this time, had travelled a long way 

 from the round egg and the lithe larva ; even geographically it was 

 a long way from them. The currents had carried it inshore through 

 many miles of deeper water to land it accurately in the shallow- 

 ness of a bay. 



Because of this history people were able to understand that these 

 fish were related to the other bony fish rather than to the flat 

 things they resembled and that were equally at home in their native 

 waters. Though the adults looked more like skate than like cod, 

 yet the young, the larvae, were indubitably roundfish of the same 

 kind as the gadoids. They did not resemble either the skates or 

 the dogfish, and the dogfish were distant relatives of the skate. 



lOO 



