chapter 9 



Whence the 

 Shadows? 



Eons before man or his works appeared 

 on earth, the shark was the monarch of 

 the primordial seas. Our greatest mountains— the Andes, the Alps, the 

 Rockies, the Himalayas— thrust upward from the earth some 60 mil- 

 lion years ago. Man, as Homo sapiens, is believed to have appeared 

 barely a million years ago. While the evolutionary forces of life spawned 

 countless forms that lived briefly in the crucible of the awakening earth 

 and then expired forever, sharks have lived on. As prehistoric era after 

 era passed— as amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals came forth— 

 the shark remained. The pterodactyls, flying reptiles which coursed 

 the skies during countless millennia, disappeared. The dinosaurs— Bro??- 

 tosaurus, Allosaunis, Triceratops, and a thousand more— stalked the 

 earth in ponderous supremacy and vanished into extinction. But, the 

 shark lived on. 



In the vast spectrum of life, each creature finds its place, from the 

 humble protozoan to the reigning vertebrate. The spectrum begins with 

 a faint glimmer out of the void— a small packet of protein. Almost im- 

 perceptibly, the spark of life flickers next in the ultrafiltrable virus, the 

 bacterium, the protozoan, then the multiple-celled sponges, jellyfishes 

 and corals. Then, more strongly, in the starfish and the worm. Now, its 

 glow brightening, it passes through the snail, the clam, and the squid. 

 Next the light bathes the spider, the scorpion, the lobster, and the insect. 

 Finally, in a burst of brilliance, the spectrum ends with the vertebrates 

 —fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. And there, among all 

 these species of the modern animal kingdom, are two creatures. One, 

 man, newly arrived; the other, the shark, which has passed through some 

 500 million years of existence, but still persists, and in some cases with 

 but very little change. 



In the Devonian Period, which spanned the time between 320 and 

 265 million years ago, millipedes, mites, spiders, and wingless insects ap- 

 peared on an earth turning green with the first land plants. In the times 

 that preceded the Devonian Period, fish dwelt only in inland waters. 

 Some barely resembled modern fish, for they were jawless and heavily 



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