THE GREAT MARINE VERTEBRATES 427 



most extraordinary weapon ever used by man in his pursuit of help- 

 less animals, is doing its deadly work at a rate that does not permit 

 delay. 



No effective measure has yet been taken ; although man has actually 

 made his first pause in the brutal butchery and reckless waste of the 

 whale kind, begun a thousand years ago, and now nearing an end 

 hastened in geometric proportion by modern invention. 



The capture of the finback and other whales is indeed forbidden in 

 the Norwegian fjords, but this is of little avail; for, unfortunately, 

 the whales visiting the Scandinavian coast to calve and feed their 

 young make a round into the far northern waters about the Bear 

 Island and Spitzbergen, and are there slaughtered just as inevitably. 

 When I was at the Bear Island whaling establishment early in July 

 last I was informed that up to that time the season's catch already 

 numbered forty-seven; and the evidence on every hand, the several 

 thousand barrels of oil on the hillside, the skeleton-lined shore, the 

 thousands of carrion-eating birds, and the trying-out works that sent 

 up an odor that literally smelled to heaven as it floated away for miles 

 over mountain, valley and snow field — all these told the story of short- 

 sighted human greed better than records. 



This reckless arctic hunt is now largely confined to the finback, to 

 Balcenoptera borealis, to the gigantic blue whale, Balamopteris mus- 

 culus, and to Megaptera longimana. It is a bloody hunt, occurring 

 when the females, which show throughout an extraordinary affection, 

 are suckling their young. 



The most recently attacked form is the bottle-nose, Hyperoodon 

 rostratus; and just twenty-seven years have brought this superb grega- 

 rious animal to the verge of extinction; for although worth but a few 

 hundred dollars each, this species is easy to catch. Unlike the fierce 

 and wary " cachalot" its wondering curiosity and lack of fear makes it 

 easy prey. 



For the greater part, however, the whale butchery is, for a second 

 time, being transferred to the Antarctic, where, after an interim of 

 fifty years, whales are again more plentiful, showing very conclusively 

 the need of exact study of the habits of the whale and an international 

 police patrol. So far as we are monetarily concerned, it may be stated 

 that the whaling industry of the United States, north and south, from 

 1835 to the wane of the fisheries about 1872, yielded oil and bone worth 

 $272,000,000 ; this vast sum being the net from 19,943 voyages with a 

 capture of 300,000 whales. 



The total capture of all the species of whale mentioned above may 

 well fall short of 1,000,000 individuals — certainly a limited number 

 when we consider a hunt that has occupied the maritime nations of the 

 globe for quite 1,000 years, and a number, moreover, that warns us how 

 very liable to extinction are all enormous and highly specialized mam- 



