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THE INHABITANTS OF THE SJSA. 



Ordinary swimmers are constantly falling a prey to the 

 sharks of warm climates. Thus Sir Brooke Watson, when in 

 tbe 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 

 Zygffina, 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 (& mcuxrumus), 

 which feeds on sea-weeds and me- 

 dusae, 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 (Garcharias 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 

 rapid succession. This, in- 

 deed, often leads to their own 

 destruction, but when their 

 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 roll- 

 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 



Blue-Shark. 



