The toothed whales are nearer to the ancestral primitive whales than are the whalebone whales. The latter are the more peculiar, and specially adapted with their huge heads and mouths (a third the length of the whole animal in the Greenland whale), and their palisades of 350 whalebone planks, some 12 ft. long, on each side of the mouth. I may mention in parenthesis that, whilst whalebone has been largely superseded by light steel in the making of umbrellas and corsets, its value remains, or rather increases, on account of its being the only material for making certain kinds of large brushes which are used in cleaning machinery. The whalebone whales have, when first born, very minute teeth hidden in their jaws; they disappear. Some of the toothed whales have teeth only in the lower jaw (the cachalot), others (the beaked whales, Ziphius, etc.) have only one pair or two pairs of teeth. These are tusk-like, and placed in the lower jaw. Others (the dolphins and porpoises) have very numerous peg-like teeth in each jaw. Some of them feed on fish, pursuing the shoals of fish in parties or "schools."
A truly terrible toothed whale is the large porpoise called the killer (known to zoologists as Orca gladiator). He is the wolf of the sea, far more active and formidable than any shark, about 10 ft. long, and strangely marked in black, white, and yellow. He has jaws bigger than those of the largest Mugger crocodile, and a tremendous array of fang-like teeth. These killers hunt the Right (or whalebone) whales in all parts of the world, in parties of three to twelve. They hang on to the lips of their enormous "quarry," and once they get a hold, in twenty minutes tear it into pieces. Often they satisfy themselves with tearing out and devouring the gigantic tongue of their victim, leaving the carcase untouched.
The narwhal and the white whale, or Beluga, which furnishes "porpoise-hide" for boots and laces, are both caught in northern seas, and form a closely allied pair, similar to one another in shape and colour (the one white, the other grey), and of moderate size, about 12 ft. long. They both feed on cuttle-fish and minute shrimps, but the Beluga has many teeth and the narwhal (with the exception of some rudimentary ones) only a single pair, and these in the front of the upper jaw. In the female narwhal their pair of teeth remain permanently concealed in the jaw bone, and so does the right side one of the male. But the left side tooth of the male grows to an enormous size, projecting horizontally in front of the narwhal to a length of seven or eight feet. It is a powerful weapon, and is formed of ivory spirally grooved on the surface. The narwhal was called "the unicorn fish" or "Monoceras" in ancient times, and its spirally marked tooth was confused with the horn of the terrestrial unicorn—the rhinoceros. Very rarely the right tooth of the male narwhal grows to full size side by side with the left tooth. A specimen showing this double-toothed condition is in the Natural History Museum. A most curious fact, quite unexplained as yet, is that the spiral grooving on both the teeth turns in the same direction; in both it is like a spiral staircase in mounting which (starting from the base implanted in the jaw) you continually turn to the right. Now, in all other animal structures which have a spiral growth and are paired—one belonging to the right side of the animal, the other to the left, as, for instance, the spirally marked horns of antelopes and the more loosely coiled horns of sheep and cattle—one of the pair forms a right-handed and the other a left-handed spiral. They are "complementary"; one is the reflection, as in a mirror, of the other. Why the narwhal's tooth does not conform to this rule is a mystery.
It is a remarkable fact that only a few whales and porpoises eat fish or the flesh of other whales. The large toothed-whales, including the cachalot or sperm whale, and also the Ziphius-like beaked whales, live upon cuttle-fish. And it seems that they know where to hunt for this special article of diet and how to find it in quantity (probably at great depths in the ocean), which naturalists do not. Many new kinds of cuttle-fish have been discovered by examining the contents of the stomach of captured whales. The sperm whale feeds on monster squid and poulp such as we rarely, if ever, see alive or washed up on the shore. The hide of these cuttle-fish-eating whales and porpoises is scratched and scarred by the hooks attached to the suckers on the arms of the great cuttle-fish, and a test of the genuine character of ambergris which forms as a concretion in the intestine of the sperm-whale is that it contains fragments of the horny beaks and hooks of the cuttle-fish digested by the whale. The food of the whalebone whales consists of minute crustacea and of the little floating molluscs known as Clio borealis, as big as the last joint of one's little finger, which float by millions in the Arctic Ocean. The whalebone whales, after letting their huge mouths fill with the sea-water in which these creatures are floating, squeeze it out through the strainer formed by the whalebone palisade on each side—by raising the tongue and floor of the mouth. The water passes out through the strainer, and the nourishing morsels remain.
Some fossil jaws and skulls of whales from miocene and older tertiary strata are known which tend to connect the toothed whales with those mammals not modified for marine life. But the approach in that direction does not go very far. The extinct whales called Squalodon have tusk-like front teeth and molars which have the outline of a leaf with a coarsely "serrated" edge. The bones of the face are also, in them, more like those of an ordinary mammal than is the case with modern toothed whales. The snout is not so long, and the bones which form it are a little more like those of a fox's snout than are those of the dolphin's "beak." But on the whole it is astonishing how little we know of fossil whales. We have yet to discover ancestral forms possessing small hind legs, but whale-like in other features. Some day a lucky "fossil-hunter" will come upon the remains of a series of whale-ancestors probably of Eocene age, and we shall know the steps by which a quadruped was changed into a cetacean—just as we have recently learned the history of the development of elephants. We know even less about the ancestry of bats and the steps by which they acquired their wings than we do about the history of whales. These discoveries await future generations of men when "cuttings" and "pits" and quarries shall have been made in the rest of the earth's surface to the same extent as they have been in Europe and in parts of the American continent.
CHAPTER XXVII
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE
I submit, as the final chapter of this little volume of miscellaneous diversions, a few words intended to meet what has become a recurrent misrepresentation and absurdity for which the annual congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science furnishes the opportunity. Glib writers in various journals regularly seize this occasion to pour forth their lamentations concerning the incapacity of "science" and the disappointment which they experience in finding that it does not do what it never professed to do. They deplore that those engaged in the making of that new knowledge of nature which we call "science" do not discover things which they never set out to discover or thought it possible to discover, although the glib gentlemen who write, with a false assumption of knowledge, pretend that these things are what the investigations of scientific inquirers are intended to ascertain. We read, at that season of the year, articles upon "What Scientists do not know" and "The Bankruptcy of Science," in which it is pretended that the purpose of science is to solve the mystery, or, as it has been called, the "riddle," of the universe, and it is pointed out, with something like malicious satisfaction, that, to judge by the proceedings of the congress of scientific investigators just concluded, we are no nearer a solution of that mystery than men were in the days of Aristotle: and it is added that false hopes have been raised, and that matters which were once considered settled have again passed into the melting-pot!