Hugh McCormick Smith

“ How easy it would be for a man-eater to devour a person, may be judged from the finding of a whole hundred-pound sea-lion in the stomach of a thirty-foot shark on the California coast. A certain man-eater, thirty-six and a half feet long, had jaws twenty inches wide inside, and teeth two and a half inches long. ”

“ The largest examples have saws six feet long, and a foot wide at the base, with teeth several inches long. The sawfish is without commercial value, and is never sought, but it has the faculty of getting entangled in the fishermen’s nets and badly damaging them in its struggles to escape, so that the fishermen regard it as a nuisance, and have to handle it with care in order to avoid the serious injury that might be inflicted by a lateral sweep of a big fish’s saw. ”

“ On such a monster, lying on its side, there would be room for thirty men to stand.
A Sawfish entangled in a net.
(This fish is about twenty feet long when full-grown.)
In the lagoons, sounds, and bayous of the West Indies and our southern coast, there exists in abundance a fish of great length, called the sawfish, The species is well known to those who reside on or visit the South Atlantic and Gulf seaboards, and the “saws” are familiar objects in “curio ” stores all aver the country. This fish has a broad, depressed body, and its greatest length exceeds twenty feet. ”

“ Built on the compact and graceful lines of our common mackerel, it excels in speed, alertness, and vigor among the fishes of the high seas, and might very easily make a trip across the ocean in one third the time of our fastest steamships. ”