WHALES, PAST AND PRESENT. 



205 



Fig. 7. Narwhal. 



of whales equaling in size those that are now to be met with in the 

 ocean. The size of whales, as of all other things whose most striking 

 attribute is magnitude, has been greatly exaggerated ; but, when re- 

 duced to the limits of sober fact, the Greenland right whale of fifty 

 feet long, the sperm whale of sixty, and the great northern rorqual 

 (Balcenoptera Sibbaldii) of 

 eighty, exceed all other or- 

 ganic structures known, past 

 or present. Instead of living 

 in an age of degeneracy of 

 physical growth, we are in 

 an age of giants, but it may 

 be at the end of that age. 

 For countless ages impulses 

 from within and the forces 

 of circumstances from with- 

 out have been gradually 

 shaping the whales into their 

 present wonderful form and 



gigantic size, but the very perfection of their structure and their mag- 

 nitude combined, the rich supply of oil protecting their internal parts 

 from cold, the beautiful apparatus of whalebone by which their nutri- 

 tion is provided for, have been fatal gifts, which, under the sudden 

 revolution produced on the surface of the globe by the development of 

 the wants and arts of civilized man, can not but lead in a few years to 

 their extinction. 



Let us return to the question with which we started, " What was 

 the probable origin of whales ? " The evidence is absolutely conclu- 

 sive that they were not originally aquatic in habit, but are derived 

 from terrestrial mammals of fairly high organization, belonging to the 

 placental division of the class animals in which a hairy covering was 

 developed, and with sense-organs, especially that of smell, adapted for 

 living on land ; animals, moreover, with four completely developed 

 pairs of limbs on the type of the higher vertebrata, and not of that of 

 fishes. 



One of the methods by which a land mammal may have been 

 changed into an aquatic one is clearly shown in the stages which still 

 survive among the carnivora. The seals are obviously modifications 

 of the land carnivora, the Otaria, or sea-lions and sea-bears, being cu- 

 riously intermediate. Many naturalists have been tempted to think 

 that the whales represent a still further stage of the same kind of 

 modification. But there is to my mind a fatal objection to this view. 

 The seal, of course, has much in common with the whale, inasmuch as 

 it is a mammal adapted for an aquatic life, but it has been converted 

 to its general fish-like form by the peculiar development of its hind- 

 limbs into instruments of propulsion through the water ; for, though 



