A BLUE WHALE
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There is a Right Whale of Atlantic waters, closely related to the Right or Greenland Whale of Arctic Seas, though in some respects different. But the Greenland Whale may be taken as the typical specimen of its race.
And a mighty creature it is; often fifty feet, and sometimes sixty or seventy, in length. A ribbon passed belt-wise around that massive form, at its thickest, would need to be something like forty feet in length. So the Right Whale does not boast a slim waist.
The enormous head, with its capacious cavern of a mouth, takes up about one-third of the whole body.
An individual of this size weighs some seventy tons. And yet so light is its make—partly due to the construction of its bones, partly no doubt to its great lung capacity—that it actually weighs less than water, and can with the utmost ease float close to the surface.
Indeed, a Greenland whale seldom by choice wanders very far below. He much prefers to come up and breathe every ten or fifteen minutes; though, when fleeing from the deadly harpoon, he has been known to stay under water at a stretch more than three-quarters of an hour. But this is exceptional.
At the top of the head are a couple of “blow-holes,” through which, when he rises to the surface, he breathes.
In colouring he is black above, white below. A skin about one inch thick covers enormous masses of fat, more than a foot in thickness; a fine warm blanket to guard him from cold, but also, unfortunately for the whale, an attraction to human beings, for the sake of the oil which it yields. The outer skin is often thickly overgrown with masses of barnacles.
Perhaps the most singular thing about this great creature is that it has no teeth, and that it feeds in consequence upon the lightest possible fare.