Living Silver 



its quota of the Ammodytes shoals . The wriggHng mouthfuls were 

 everywhere, and they had no defence mechanism whatsoever, un- 

 less it was the unsatisfactory one of trying to burrow into the hard 

 sand of the bottom. Nobody knew for certain, nobody knew about 

 sand eels. 



Occasionally, one of the less ambitious line boats would use 

 them as bait. Apart from that, however, sand eels were of no di- 

 rect importance to fishermen. They did not try to catch them and 

 they knew little about them. It was here, more than anywhere 

 else, that the scientist felt his helplessness in the face of tradi- 

 tional ignorance. How much easier it would have been to correct 

 traditional errors than to efface this ignorance ! Error is a kind of 

 knowledge, inaccurate perhaps, but still the shadow of knowledge. 

 Knowledge and error never exist independently. And wisdom 

 is perhaps the sun that casts the shadow. And the cincestral lore 

 of fishermen was, indeed, fouled with many superstitious errors. 

 But, at least, it was there. And, in marine science where the col- 

 lection of even a few scattered observations involved immense ex- 

 pense and laborious years of planning, progress thrived on this 

 regimen of erroneous knowledge . A few observations could cor- 

 rect an error. They could not lay the foundations of a system of 

 knowledge. The system had to be created by generations of illit- 

 erate fishermen who could not afford to be wrong about matters 

 of fact, since their lives literally depended upon their being right. 

 They had not depended directly on Ammodytes and therefore, they 

 had not bothered to create myths about it. They had not made 

 enough observations to engender a superstition. The scientists 

 did what they could but not even the best of them could create a 

 whole biology out of a few hundred tiny corpses. 



An eel-like fish, grey and long and thin, it had pectoral and anal 

 fins, and bore no relationship whatever to the true eels. Rather 

 it was close to the caplin, the whitebait of Newfoundland, that 

 runs inshore, like the grunion, to spawn on a high tide. The eggs 

 develop in the sand until the next high springtide, two weeks 

 later, allows the young to hatch out and put to sea. It seemed 



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