Living Silver 



were invariably herring powers. But then, too, a great naval 

 power was able to protect her cargo vessels and so to develop into 

 a great commercial power. And all the empires of Western Eur- 

 ope had begun as commercial enterprises. There was a facetious 

 enormity about the whole business. When Jan was sure that he 

 could explain European history in terms of herring fluctuations he 

 began to wonder if the speculations of more influential historians 

 were no better based. If a man were interested in economics in 

 the first place he could state all human fluctuations in terms of 

 economics. If religion were his first love then all wars would be 

 religious ones. But if he happened to be a fisherman then world 

 history degenerated into a by-product of the fishing industry. 

 What then became of the pure historian? He, Jan thought, had 

 better learn to Avrite, for his work would have a purely literary 

 interest if, indeed, it had any. The herring on the table goggled 

 with amusement. 



Night-blue and star- white, with the semitransparencies of the 

 jaw bones opening into a frilled purplish gullet, the mouth pointed 

 when shut, the lower jaw as leading edge, opened to become a 

 wide-brimmed jug, a jug that in life was continually being filled 

 with sea water. And the brownish red of the gills through which 

 the blood exchanged carbon dioxide for oxygen as in all other 

 fishes. But the gills too had another purpose quite different from 

 any use served by the gills of gadoids and pleuronectidae. They 

 filtered water, the water that poured in through the curved brim 

 of the mouth, and they combed animals out of it, little animals, 

 the flimsy archetypes of shrimp and the young and larvae of the 

 sand eel. It was on these microscopic creatures that the herring 

 lived. Jan dissected out a gill. It lay arched like a bent wing be- 

 fore him ; and the long primary feathers were the breathing fila- 

 ments ; behind them the gill combs that sorted out the floating life 

 of the sea and transferred it to the belly of the herring. Many 

 other animals lived on this animal plankton, the immense whale- 

 bone whale, for example, the bat-winged skate and the basking 

 shark, but none were so numerous or so important to man as the 



184 



