8o A BOOK OF WHALES 



of mammal as the brain development has pursued so 

 different a path. Sir William Turner has pointed 

 out that a large number of the smaller convolutions 

 of the whale's brain are transverse to the long axis 

 of that organ, which suggests that there has been, 

 as it were, a tendency to grow forward in the ordinary 

 mammalian fashion, but a check to the same growth, 

 which has naturally resulted in furrows having the 

 direction referred to. In any case the whale's brain 

 is partly characterised by the features to which atten- 

 tion has been called. 



It is also remarkable for the fact that in the toothed 

 whales there is absolutely no vestige of those fore 

 parts of the brain which are connected with the sense 

 of smell ; while in the whalebone whales the same 

 region is only feebly visible. It is sometimes erro- 

 neously asserted that creatures living in the water 

 cannot smell owing to the suspension in the water of 

 the odoriferous particles ; but this is at once negatived 

 by the case of fishes, which have a well-developed 

 olfactory apparatus. Anyhow, whales have not ; but 

 it is apparently not to be put clown to their marine 

 habitat, one of the very few structures indeed which 

 cannot be correlated with that mode of life. 



WHALEBONE 



The real nature of whalebone was frequently, like 

 that of spermaceti, misunderstood in past times. 

 Belon (translated by Scammon) wrote upon the matter 

 as follows: "And that which is called whalebone 



