Roundjish 



haviour, to anything that could be called intelligence, but more 

 simply to the sagacity of flesh and bone, to sheer anatomical supre- 

 macy. It was not any single organ that differentiated them and 

 made them supreme. Their sense of smell was not so keen as that 

 of the dogfish, their powers of camouflage were weak when com- 

 pared with those of the plaice, and the muscularity of their bodies 

 was surpassed by species as different as the mackerel and the sal- 

 mon. Yet the gadoids were spreading, were continually stealing 

 the environments of all their marine competitors, the sea-bed and 

 the surface waters, spreading north certainly and spreading savage- 

 ly to the south. Probably they were originally a northern tribe : 

 but the hake had established itself as a Mediterranean species, and 

 the hake too was a gadoid, though it was not a typical one. 



It was difficult, though, to decide on type. When a group of 

 animals is highly successful over an enormous range of environ- 

 ments, then it tends to break up into a number of sub-groups, 

 each of which is specialised and localised, furnished with anatomi- 

 cal features that assure it of an even higher degree of success than 

 its more generalised ancestors would have had over some new but 

 more limited range. And there were signs that the gadoids were 

 undergoing this process of divergent evolution. But then what 

 happened to the idea of type ? Was the typical gadoid the special- 

 ised newcomer who now held the seeds of new evolutionary pro- 

 gress ? Or was it the old generalised animal that was already dying 

 out because it could not compete in any particular environment 

 (though it could range over a wider variety of environments) with 

 its owm more highly adapted descendants? And which gadoids, 

 anyhow, were the more highly adapted ? It was so difficult to es- 

 tablish the boundaries of a marine environment that even this ques- 

 tion was beyond him. He gave up all idea of 'highly adapted' and 

 went on sheer success. By that standard then there could be only 

 one type of the gadoid, and that type was the cod. 



The cod was certainly successful. It seemed to be everywhere 

 in northern waters. It was almost impossible to throw a net over 

 the side of a ship without taking some cod. It lived in the shallow- 



73 



