An Odd Fish OLD FOURLEGS. By J. L. B. Smith.
(Longmans, 21s.) THERE is usually a row going on between the Augustans in at least one department of the Natural History Museum in London
and the tough, publish-and-be-damned scientists of South Africa who have discovered a few good things in their time. It's fairly easy to see how the trouble starts. The veldt is a dry storehouse with a fossil record going back to the beginning of biological time. There is reason for thinking that not only Man but life itself arose in what are now the old rocks of Rhodesia. And when any- thing turns up, as it often does, the South Africans are tempted to publish without so much as a by-your-leave to the museum men of SW7 who are sitting on top of crates of reference material. Then the rude remarks slowly seep out of the pages of the learned journals. Robert Broom, who unearthed many of the skulls of the so-called South African ape-men, used to get hopping mad at the mere sound of South Kensington. And now it looks as if the war has been carried to sea. Dr. Smith, a chemist by train- ing, who had much to do with the discovery of the coelacanth, the 'fish with legs,' is astonished at the museum, and Smith is an astonishing fellow himself.
It is to his great credit that he recognised the coelacanth from a rough sketch made shortly after the first speciman was caught in 1939. But from that point onwards Old Fourlegs became an obsession. Smith rang up prime ministers; he chartered planes, plastered the seaports with leaflets offering £100 reward for the capture of another and eventually, breathlessly, with more ballyhoo than usually follows the birth of quintuplets, he got 'one helluva fish.'
But what fish? The fishes as a whole are practically all 'living fossils.' They are essentially the same as they were seventy million years ago. The almost unchanged ancestors of the coelacanth are certainly a good deal older than that but they are by no means 'missing links'; they don't connect other types of known animals, and it is very doubtful indeed whether they will throw any light on the ancestry of Man. But Smith got his fish before the French stepped in and organised a coelacanth industry based on Madagascar. He has told the story as nobody else could tell it and the museum comes in for some rude remarks from what must be the most enthusiastic fisherman alive. An odd book, an odd, likeable man, and quite an odd fish. JOHN HILLARY
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