Living Silver 



the salmon. Both herring and salmon had the fine rayed fins that 

 were also found among the gadoids but, whereas the pelvic fins of 

 a cod were situated in front of the pectoral ones, those of a herring 

 or a salmon lay far back, near the anus. And the anus, too, was 

 more posterior because these primitive teleosts had guts which 

 ran straight back and did not curve round again towards the gills 

 as they did in the case of the gadoids and, even inore spectacularly, 

 of the pleuronectidae. These primitive features of the anatomy, 

 however, were unable to keep the herring population of the world 

 from expanding so quickly that it almost justified Huxley's stigma- 

 tisation of mankind as a community of herring hunters . 



HERRING 



At first Jan found it difficult to believe that so primitive an ani- 

 mal could be so successful. Like most people without a biological 

 training, he was inclined to the superstition that a high degree of 

 evolutionary specialisation was rather like getting high marks in 

 an exam and was correspondingly rewarded by some cosmic bio- 

 logical examiner. But, when he really came to think of it, there 

 was no justification for this analogy. Very few of the more suc- 

 cessful animals were also highly evolved and some of them were 

 among the most primitive of creatures. The limpet, found among 

 the earliest fossils, remained unchanged on the rocky coast north 

 of Peterhead and the world population of limpets was continually 

 expanding. The locust that threatened man with extinction over 

 large areas of the middle east was one of the most primitive insects. 

 And even then he was not thinking of worms, like the nematodes, 

 that evolution seemed to have by-passed though they still managed 



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