250 THE INHABITANTS OF THE SEA, 
Ordinary swimmers are constantly falling a prey to the 
sharks of warm climates. Thus Sir Brooke Watson, when in 
the West Indies, as a youth, was swimming at a little dis- 
tance from a ship, when he saw a shark making towards him. 
Struck with terror at its approach, he immediately cried out 
for assistance. A rope was instantly thrown, but, even while 
the men were in the act of drawing him up the ship’s side, 
the monster darted after him, and at a single snap took off 
his leg. 
Fortunately for the friends of sea-bathing on our shores, the 
white shark, like his relation, the monstrous Hammer-headed 
Zygena, appears but seldom in the colder latitudes, though both 
have occasionally been found on the British coast. 
The northern ocean has got its peculiar sharks, but they 
_are generally either good-natured like 
~ the huge basking shark (S. maaimus), 
which feeds on sea-weeds and me- 
dusze, or else like the Picked dog-fish 
(Galeus acanthius), of too small a size 
to be dangerous to man, in spite of 
the ferocity of their nature. 
But the dog-fish and several other species of our seas, such as 
the Blue Shark (Carcharias glaucus), though they do not attempt 
the fisherman’s life, are ex- 
tremely troublesome and in- 
jurious to him, by hovering 
about his boat and cutting 
the hooks from the lines in 
Picked Dog-Fish. 
rapid succession. This, in- 
deed, often leads to their own 
3 destruction, but when thei 
Blue-Shark. teeth do not deliver them 
from their difficulty, the blue 
sharks, which hover about the Cornish coast during the pilchard 
season, have a singular method of proceeding, which is, by roil- 
ing the body round so as to twine the line about them through- 
out its whole length; and sometimes this is done in such a 
complicated manner, that Mr. Yarrell has known a fisherman 
give up any attempt to unroll it as a hopeless task. To the 
pilchard drift-net this shark is a still more dangerous enemy, 
and it is common for it to pass in succession along the 
