SIDE VIEW OF THE MOUTH.
"I put it in that way, Ben, so as to draw your attention sharply to it. Whalebone is not bone at all; it is a totally different substance. Look at these two drawings of the mouth of the whale you have just seen. The first is made from the front, looking into the great opening, and the figure of a child is placed there. This has been done to show you how large it really is. And by-the-way, Bennie, in the mouth of a whale of the largest size a grown man would appear no larger in proportion than this child does now. The other is a side view of the mouth, lips, etc.; inside the lips you can see the whalebone. This consists of a series of flat plates, attached to the skull in the roof of the mouth, and hanging down in a long row on each side between the great fat tongue and the lip. They are longest in the middle of the length of the mouth, and grow shorter toward the front and toward the rear. In the one here represented I thought the longest plates would measure between five and six feet, but I have seen many of them, taken from the whales of the Northwest coast, which were fourteen to fifteen feet long. Each 'slab' of bone is broadest at the top, and tapers downward, and its edge is split into a sort of fringe, and it is by means of that that the bonewhales secure their food. Look at those enormous lips standing up. The whale drops his lips until they lie flat, and then, swimming slowly along, the small molluscous animals on which he lives drift into his mouth. When he thinks he has enough for a mouthful, he raises his lips, and with his great tongue forces out the water between the plates of bone, through the mat of fibres. The mollusca are caught on the fringe, licked off, and swallowed. Seems like small food for such great animals, perhaps, but this is their mode of living."
FRONT VIEW OF THE MOUTH.
"Is this one a right-whale, Uncle Horace?"
"No, it is not. They call it so, and they probably are honest in their statement, for the two species are very much alike. But the right-whale is an arctic species, and is larger, being sometimes sixty-five feet long; this species is, I think, never over fifty, and lives in the Atlantic Ocean, not the arctic."
"Is sixty-five feet as long as any whales grow?"
"Oh no. Some of the fin-backs have been measured which were one hundred and ten feet long, and I am sure I have seen them as long as that. Whalemen, however, seldom kill them, for they make but little oil, and they fight sometimes very fiercely when they are attacked."
"But isn't it strange, Uncle Horace, that such monstrous animals can be killed. I should think they would kill the men who tried to fight them."