CHAPTER IV.
THE WHALE.
It seems strange that the largest animal in nature should live in these regions, where you would think everything must be starved by the cold. But so it is, and it should lead you to reflect, how wonderfully the principle which animates living beings, by the outward form and constitution which it gives to the bodies of animals, adapts them to support the various circumstances in which they are placed.
There are many kinds of whale which all agree in these particulars. They are very much larger than any other creatures existing; they live in the sea and yet suckle their young with milk, and have warm blood and lungs like land animals, so that they can only breathe by putting their heads above water. Some people have doubted whether it was proper to call the whale a fish, but on the whole it is certainly more like fishes than it is like any other of the great divisions of animals, seeing that it swims with fins, and cannot live out of the water.
The Greenland whale (naturalists call it Balena Mysticetus,) is the most important of the varieties, as it is the one which produces train oil in the largest quantities, and whalebone. In common with all the others, it is a most awkward looking creature. Here is a picture of one. Its usual length is from 40 to 60 feet; and the circumference of its body about 40. It not unfrequently weighs 60 or 70 tons, which is more than the weight of 180 fat oxen.
The tail is commonly about 6 feet long, and 25 feet wide. It lies flat upon the water, and is what the creature principally uses in swimming, for the fins near the head appear to be used merely to keep the body steady in the water. It is also a weapon of defence, and possesses prodigious strength, as you shall hear by and by.
The inside of the mouth is, perhaps, the most wonderful part of the whale, both from its size and construction. I was once in one, which was 15 feet in length and 7 feet wide.
It is from the mouth that the Whalebone, as it is called, comes. The jaws are not furnished with teeth, but in their place there is something which forms a curious sort of shrimp-trap, which I will describe to you. The whalebone is ranged along in blades upon the jaws, like the laths of a Venetian blind, and the inner edge of each blade is furnished with a fringe of fibrous stuff almost like hair.
The natural position of the whale's mouth seems to be open, and it mostly swims along or lies near the surface, with its lower jaw hanging down. Little fish and insects, most of them of the smallest size, thus come in contact with the smooth edge of the blades of bone, slip between them, and become entangled in the hairy fringe of the inner edge, so that they can never get out again. When the whale thinks he has got enough in his mouth, he immediately raises his enormous lower jaw and swallows. One of his mouthfuls must often consist of millions of living creatures, respecting the kinds of which I shall have something to tell you in a future page.