INTRODUCTORY 



THE subject of which the present volume treats 

 is undoubtedly one of interest to the general 

 public as well as to the naturalist. The huge size of 

 many of these creatures, the rarity of the occurrence 

 of some of them, and the mystery which envelops 

 the habits of the great bulk of the species is attractive. 

 Besides, to many people the whale is an ingenious 

 paradox, by reason of the fact that it lives in the 

 water and yet is not a fish. At no more remote a 

 date than 1895, thought Professor Huxley,* this 

 question of the fish -like nature of whales was not 

 settled for many persons. Such persons, however, 

 had on their side the naturalists of the sixteenth and 

 even the seventeenth centuries, who classified whales 

 with fish. Even so recently as 1818 (I quote from 

 Sir William Flower) the current edition of Johnsons 

 Dictionary defined a fish as an animal inhabiting the 

 water ; hence a whale undoubtedly coming under the 



* Professor Huxley's doubts are borne out by a sage note to Milton's 

 Paradise Lost) in a Clarendon Press edition of 1872. "By dolphins are 

 here meant porpoises," observes the commentator ; " the modern dolphin 

 is another kind of fish." It would be difficult to embody in a single 

 sentence more pretension to knowledge and more ignorance. 



