40 American Fisheries Society 



whether the boom would withstand his onslaught. Final- 

 ly he tore a very large section out of the unfortunate 

 one's belly, tearing out and devouring the entire liver and 

 leaving a gaping hole across the entire width of the body, 

 large enough to permit a child to crawl into the body 

 cavity. At this instant one of the Captain's bullets hit a 

 vital spot and, after a lively struggle on the part of a 

 launch's crew, a rope was secured around the shark's tail 

 and the four were brought to the laboratory for examin- 

 ation. The last shark was 12 feet in length, and the liver 

 of the smaller one was still in its stomach, — the estimated 

 weight of this was 40 pounds. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Fearing, of Rhode Island: Some years ago when I was going 

 around the world I was requested by Mr. Agassiz to make notes of 

 any absolutely authentic cases of sharks attacking human beings. He 

 believed that there is no shark known at the present time that will attack 

 a living man and there is no shark known whose jaws are capable of 

 biting a man's leg off. 



I inquired wherever I went. In Singapore, where the sharks are 

 thicker than in any other place I remember, except in Java in the very 

 warm waters under the equator, I approached the English captain of 

 the water police who had been there for over twenty years. He told 

 me that while he had seen thousands of dead bodies that had been 

 mauled and torn by sharks, he had never known, in all his experience, 

 of a case where a shark had attacked a living person. In Aden I saw 

 a boy, who, it was said, had had his leg bitten off by a shark. On 

 careful inquiry, however, it developed that he was drunk and was 

 run over by an ox cart and injured so that his leg had to be ampu- 

 tated. That was the nearest to any actual case that I was able to 

 discover in a trip around the world! However, Dr. Chas. H. Townsend 

 has told me that he has absolute personal proof and that he has him- 

 self seen natives in the tropics grabbed by sharks and eaten. 



