This blubber has another use as well. When the whale dives to a great depth—and sometimes it sinks half a mile or more beneath the surface of the sea—the pressure on its body becomes enormously great because of the weight of the water above it. If you were to dive to half that depth you would die. But the blubber of the whale is so elastic that it resists the pressure just as a great thick sheet of india-rubber would, so that the animal does not suffer from it in the least.

Mistakes of Artists

Sometimes you see pictures in which whales are drawn with very big eyes, very long ears, and perhaps even with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. Now such pictures are drawn by artists who know nothing about whales, for the eyes of these animals are quite small, their outward ears are merely little holes in the skin, closing by means of self-acting valves like those of the seals, and the tongue cannot be poked out of the mouth at all.

Now let us learn something about the different kinds of whales.

Toothed Whales

First come the toothed whales, or denticetes. As an example of these we will take the famous sperm or spermaceti whale, which is also known as the cachalot.

This whale has nearly all its teeth in the lower jaw, the upper one only having a very short row of small teeth on either side. The lower teeth are five or six inches long, and fit into pits in the upper jaw when the mouth is closed. These teeth are composed of beautiful ivory, and were formerly valued so highly by the natives of the South Sea Islands, that more than once a tribe has actually gone to war with another tribe simply to obtain possession of a single whale's tooth.

Now that it has been hunted so much, apparently the sperm-whale does not grow to so great a size as it did in days gone by. Yet it is a very big animal, for a full-grown male will attain to a length of sixty or even seventy feet, while even a baby whale is from eleven to fourteen feet long, or as big as a big walrus. And, strange to say, the head is almost as large as the body and tail put together. This is chiefly due to the fact that there is a great cavity in the skull, which contains the valuable substance we call spermaceti. When one of these whales is killed, the head is cut off, and a kind of well is dug in the forehead, from which the spermaceti is drawn to the surface in buckets, as much as thirty barrels being sometimes taken from a single animal.

Besides this, the blubber yields a large quantity of very valuable oil, which burns with a much clearer and stronger light than ordinary whale-oil. And sometimes a curious substance called ambergris is found in its body. It is used in making certain kinds of scent, and is quite costly, although as much as fifty pounds of it have sometimes been taken from a single whale.

Sperm-whales are generally seen in companies, which are known as schools. In olden days there were sometimes as many as two hundred whales in one of these schools. But so many of the great creatures have been killed by whalers that it is now quite the exception to see more than four or five together.