Note 4 — PREFACE

In spite of the fact that the New English Dictionary now finds shark applied to the fish some years before the first record of shark, a sharper, parasite, I adhere to my belief that the latter is the earlier sense. The new example quoted, from a Tudor "broadside," is more suggestive of a sailor's apt nickname than of zoological nomenclature—"There is no proper name for it that I knowe, but that sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses doth call it a sharke" (1569).