Living Silver 



of protein. In either case the end was always the same, a flick of 

 the tail, a snap of the jaws, and then the slow digestion of a living 

 creature in that thick muscular belly. 



And the more Jan came to know about the gadoids, the more 

 typical he thought the cod. The three flimsy fins on its back grew 

 to represent the class as inescapably as the five-fingered hand re- 

 presented the terrestrial quadrupeds. As with the land animals, it 

 was not necessary that everything should always be in its normal 

 structural place. A horse, for example, had only one finger and a 

 hake had only one fin. Yet somehow the anatomical sequence was 

 unbroken by such seemingly important deviations . They were not 

 significant: the underlying pattern was. The barbel too seemed 

 part of the type, though that was more difficult to understand since 

 it was absent in many gadoids. Yet it was important that these fish 

 should be thought of as having two main lines of communication 

 with the world of their prey, the one through the eyes and the 

 other through touch. That was the generalised situation, the typi- 

 cal one, rather than the one way track of the whiting which had 

 no barbel. But most important of all was the egg. In the sea, as 

 everywhere else, the most significant of biological factors is sex. 

 Sex is the peculiarity of life. Crystals can grow, can organise mat- 

 erial, but they don't reproduce sexually. Therefore they cannot 

 evolve. Only through the mechanism of sex can one generation 

 be different from, be an improvement upon, the preceding one. 

 The history of life is the history of sexuality, the history of the 

 evolution of the fertilised egg. That is why the real nature of an 

 animal, its fundamental raison d'etre, its place in the world, its ties, 

 its relationships, all these things are best seen in its sexual behav- 

 iour and in the early stages of the development of the fertilised 

 egg. And the eggs of the gadoids were all the same, all very much 

 alike; and the eggs of the cod, so small, so numerous, each with 

 its little globule of oil that kept it floating near the surface, these 

 eggs were the least extraordinary things about the fish. 



The eggs of the haddock, on the other hand, were a good deal 

 larger and there were fewer of them. Not that they departed from 



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