ron's analogy admits of hope and admits also (as science shows us) of that outlet of escape and retribution Edmund Spenser foresaw with dread nearly three centuries earlier. Although swallowed, Ireland may be reserved "in this unquiet state still for some secret scourge which shall by her come unto" the swallower. We need not go to the poets for the end of the story. Natural history furnishes the sequel. The shark sometimes swallows the wrong fish and the greatest of English naturalists tells us what has been observed to follow.
Describing the Brazilian sea fish, Diodon, which he had noticed off Bahia in the course of his voyage, Darwin says: "I have heard from Doctor Allen of Forres, that he has frequently found a Diodon floating alive and distended in the stomach of the shark, and that on several occasions he had known it to eat its way, not only through the coats of the stomach, but through the sides of the monster, which has thus been killed. Who would ever have imagined that a little soft fish could have destroyed the great and savage shark?"
May it be found when German Science begins its great voyage for the freeing of the seas that the Irish Diodon was indeed the wrong fish for the World Shark to swallow!
