The Primitives 



public refused to buy them at anything like the same price as it 

 paid for salmon. Nothing could make the dogfish respectable and 

 commercial. Dressed in its skin it looked like a long leather thong 

 rough all round, and tough, stained by smoke. With its skin off, 

 it was still worse, solid trickles of diluted blood interrupted by 

 arbitrary veins. Alive it was obviously unhealthy, unappetising 

 and greedy. Once captured it became nothing more than a sliver 

 of deadness stretched on a slab. The fishmongers did their best 

 but they could persuade nobody that such wretched things were 

 salmon. 



And yet, if only the sharks had been appreciated at their own 

 value rather than as competitors of the bony fish, there was much 

 to be said for them. Men had fished them for oil, and for meat, 

 and for their skins, their tough tender skins that made the best 

 leather in the world. But the skin of the dogfish was too small, 

 its oil was inferior, and its flesh had been reduced to the status of 

 rock salmon. They were, in fact, so nearly unsaleable that there 

 was no reason for the fishermen to try to find them : but they were 

 simply unavoidable. 



From his experiences aboard a trawler, Jan did find out a good 

 deal about dogfish. He ended up by thinking them more similar 

 to whiting than to any of the other species sought commercially. 

 The resemblance, of course, was in their behaviour : there was no 

 biological or anatomical likeness. The dogfish and the whiting 

 lived over the same grounds at about the same depths, and they 

 both shoaled in immense numbers. It was just such things that 

 they had in common : but the local intensity of both species was so 

 great that there was seldom an overlap in catches. There was 

 room in the cod-end for only one of them at a time. 



Dogfish, like all other sharks, were cartilaginous fish. They did 

 not have any bones, only embryonic materials for a skeleton, a 

 flexible spare framework that was yet powerful enough to support 

 the pull of big muscles. And Jan discovered that all fish were div- 

 ided into these two types, those with bones and those without 

 them. And he also learned that most fish landed in the markets 



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