Living Silver 



They had no bones either. Their tails were all out of shape. Their 

 fins looked like oars. Their scales weren't proper scales. And as 

 for their teeth, they were only highly improper scales. At times 

 Jan was driven to think that dogfish weren't really fish. They were 

 marine mosquitoes, simple nuisances, and they were nuisances 

 only because of their numbers, not because of any special proper- 

 ties of their own. They were the deadest living things in the sea. 

 He was wrong, of course. But not so wrong as he thought he 

 was. Innocent accuracy always imagines itself to be mistaken. 

 Dogfish were fish, all right, but only in much the same way as a 

 lizard is a bird. There was no fundamental resemblance between 

 the commercial species and the dogfish except for the elementary 

 facts that they were all animals with backbones that lived in the 

 sea. They lived in the sea, and lizards didn't live like birds in the 

 air. That seemed to make them more similar. But a lot of birds 

 never left the ground : it was the final home of both the lizard and 

 the eagle, the ostrich and the pterodactyl. And, apart from their 

 habitat, the dogfish was quite as different from ordinary fish as the 

 reptiles were from their aerial descendants: perhaps, even, they 

 were more different if only fundamentals were reckoned. 



DOGnSH 



Dogfish were sharks, very little sharks, but sharks all the same. 

 It would have been as idle to say that because pickpockets didn't 

 highjack bullion they weren't criminals as it was to suggest that 

 dogfish weren't sharks because they were not maneaters. They 

 were not like sharks. They were sharks, fully growoi ones, no 

 matter how small they might be. 



And sharks, of course, were not an ordinary kind of fish. The 

 retailers lulled the public by calling them 'rock' salmon but the 



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