8:30
It was an adult , as could be seen from the six rows of teeth forming an isosceles triangle in its upper jaw . Conseil looked at it with purely scientific fascination , and I 'm sure he placed it , not without good reason , in the class of cartilaginous fish , order Chondropterygia with fixed gills , family Selacia , genus Squalus . While I was contemplating this inert mass , suddenly a dozen of these voracious melanoptera appeared around our longboat ; but , paying no attention to us , they pounced on the corpse and quarreled over every scrap of it . By 8:30 we were back on board the Nautilus . There I fell to thinking about the incidents that marked our excursion over the Mannar oysterbank . Two impressions inevitably stood out . One concerned Captain Nemo 's matchless bravery , the other his devotion to a human being , a representative of that race from which he had fled beneath the seas .