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Illustrated by cartoonist Robert Osborn.

Once in the water, you are going to be floating around in the natural element of the shark. The shark is an elasmobranch, a distant cousin of the dogfish. But that's the only good thing you can say about him. The shark is a mean, treacherous, hungry predator, which is why people hate him. People have been loathing sharks for as long as there have been people; and judging from the number of swimmers, fishermen, and some survivors who have been jumped by sharks, the feeling is mutual.

Actually, marine biologists say that sharks don't hate people; they haven't sense enough. But they sometimes act as if they did, so the effect is the same. Sharks have been known to attack men, women, and children, bags of garbage, sea gulls, swimming dogs, horses exercising in the surf, dead bodies, oars, boats, life rafts, and each other. And that's only a part of the list. One mutilated shark kept biting at detached pieces of himself. The severed head of a shark on the deck of a boat bit off the finger of a fisherman. A mortally wounded shark, apparently feeling no pain, kept making runs on a bait and eating until he sank to the bottom-dead. A delightful creature. In a popularity contest with a rattlesnake, the rattler would win going away.