The Primitives 



when it came to the business of reproduction. Two sharp flanges 

 of cartilage held the female aperture open while the male life pro- 

 ducts were impelled into it from ripe gonads. There was no such 

 sophisticated coupling among the bony fish, the gadoids and the 

 pleuronectids. They just released their genital material into the 

 water around them and there only did fertilisation take place. At 

 first this seemed to mean that the sharks were, by far, the more 

 highly developed class offish. 



Jan was taught that they were not. But he was left alone to 

 work out the reasons. Why was it that this very effective method 

 of reproduction, the same method as was employed by men and 

 women, why was it so much more primitive than the haphazard 

 ways of the bony fish? Jan finally decided that animals like the cod 

 were highly developed in one respect and in one only. They were 

 very good when it came to living at sea and making use of the sea. 

 They were effective in no other medium. When they wanted to 

 spawn they were able to make salt water act as though it were a 

 part of their own bodies. The ocean was one of their organs, and 

 it acted effectively for them. The sharks did not have this mastery 

 over their environment. They had to adapt themselves to it. They 

 had to grow limbs that would allow them to fertilise one another. 

 The sea was not enough for them. They did not have the anatomi- 

 cal and the physiological efHciency of the cod that allowed it to 

 lay so many million eggs in a nest of oceanic currents, nor did they 

 have the confidence to rely upon the kindness of cold water or 

 upon the bounty of the salt dissolved in it. The dogfish had to 

 erect a barrier between its eggs and an inimical sea : but the cod 

 had made friends with salt water and its eggs were fertilised and 

 nursed to maturity by the drift and turbulence of whole oceans. 

 Because it had become friendly with its environment, and not be- 

 cause it had conquered it, the cod was, perhaps, the most success- 

 ful of Northern Atlantic fish. 



For, indeed, there were a thousand subtleties about the cod 

 that Jan had never noticed when he looked at it and at it alone. Its 

 tail, for example, was so simple, a spiked flap of skin. Yet, when 



123 



