The Herring 



to live in their myriads in almost every environment from the 

 abyssal waters of the ocean to the human duodenum. The abiUty, 

 then, to conquer environments and to live successfully in them 

 had very little connection w^ith the ability to evolve into a more 

 highly organised type of life. Why, he asked himself, was evolu- 

 tion necessary at all? What force drove incessantly from simpli- 

 city to complexity? Natural selection could have led equally to 

 an undifferentiated living pulp that squelched haphazardly over 

 both land and water like a protean jellyfish. Yes, yes, he could 

 understand the step by step movement of evolution, the proto- 

 plasmic porridge altering into the outline of a Greek god. What 

 was inexplicable was not how these things had happened but that 

 they had happened. The mechanics of evolution Jan had mastered 

 as he had mastered the diesel engine. But he knew why the diesel 

 had been invented. Its mechanics could be fitted into a larger 

 picture of life — into economics, sociology, the hull of a ship - but 

 the huge juggernauting mechanism of evolutionary progress fitted 

 into nothing. It was either unnecessary or its motivation was mys- 

 tical. 



And there was something in the herring that brought out 

 thoughts like these. It too was mysterious, not quite in the same 

 way since it was largely the biological or mechanical success of the 

 group that formed the mystery. Still, even there, he thought he 

 saw something more magnificently mysterious in the sudden abun- 

 dances and disappearances of the little beast, something akin to 

 fate in the arbitrary rewards and punishments it distributed among 

 the men who hunted it. 



Unlike most other fish, the mystery of the herring was not a 

 result of ignorance. There was no lack of facts about the herring, 

 rather a tortuous super-abundance, a contradictory scatter of in- 

 formation and statistics that, in Europe, tapered back across a 

 millennium. Every additional fact seemed to increase the bulk of 

 the mystery, rather than to help towards an explanation. And this 

 too seemed strange until Jan reflected that the other two fish that 

 were equally well known, the salmon and the eel, were almost 



