our prey was well secured, and we stood about him in triumph.
It was a shark, measuring five feet and three inches in length, and he
must certainly have weighed nearly a hundred pounds.

From the study Mr Clare made of the subject, we found that the name by
which the shark is technically known is _Squalidae_, which includes a
large family fitly designated, as your Latin dictionary will prove when
you find the adjective _squalidus_--"filthy, slovenly, loathsome." It
is a family of many species, there being some thirty or forty cousins;
and the different forms of the teeth, snout, mouth, lips, and tail-fins,
the existence or absence of eyelids, spiracles, (those are the apertures
by which the water taken in for respiration is thrown out again), the
situation of the different fins, etcetera, distinguish the different
divisions of the common family. The cousin who, wandering about that
stormy Saturday, had frightened away the bass, and finally astonished
himself by swallowing a fish-hook when he only thought to suck a dainty
bit of his family's favourite delicacy, was known as the _Zygaena_--so
Mr Clare introduced him to us when his sharkship had grown so
exceedingly diffident as not to be able to say one word for himself--a
genus distinguished by having the sides of the head greatly prolonged in
a horizontal direction, from which circumstance they are commonly known
as the hammer-headed sharks.

His teeth were in three rows, the points of the teeth being directed
towards the corners of the mouth. The two back rows were bent down, and
only intended, Mr Clare told us, to replace the foremost when injured.
These horrible teeth were notched like a saw.

I think the face, if so you might call it, of that piratical fish wore
the most fearfully cruel and rapacious expression I had ever seen. That
_Zygaena_ family of the _Squalidae_, (I think they sound more horribly
devilish when called by their classical titles), is one dangerous to
man, and it is very rare that a man-eating or man-biting shark is ever
found on the English coast.

I proposed to cut him open, and so we did. Among the half-digested
food, most of which was fish, I found something that at first looked
like a leather strap. I seized it and pulled it out. Surely there was
a buckle. I washed and laid it out on the rock, while we all gathered
about in great excitement to make out what our dead enemy had been
preying on. There was no longer a doubt that it w