WHALES. llo 



great smooth bank out of the water, gave a sort of wallow- 

 ing roll, and quietly sank from sight again. The excite- 

 ment of the momentary sight prevented my attempting to 

 estimate its measurement, besides that the entire animal 

 was not exposed, but it seemed to me nearly as large as 

 the vessel in which I sailed. The species was no doubt 

 the great rorqual, since the whalebone whale is said never 

 to venture beyond the limits of the Arctic Seas. This is 

 the most enormous of all the animals known to inhabit 

 this globe, attaining a length of a hundred feet and even 

 more. The skeleton of one which was stranded near 

 Ostend in 1827, which was subsequenty exhibited in Paris 

 and London, measured ninety-five feet. Two specimens 

 have been measured of the lensfth of a hundred and five 

 feet, and Sir Arthur de Capel Brooke asserts that it is 

 occasionally seen of the enormous dimensions of one hun- 

 dred and twenty feet.* 



The " right " or whalebone whale, the object of commer- 

 cial enterprise in the Polar Seas, is little more than half 

 as large as this last-named bulk. Eighty and a hundred 

 feet are mentioned, indeed, by the earlier writers, as occa- 

 sional dimensions of this species, but these statements are 

 possibly exaggerations, or else the distinction between 

 this and the rorqual may have been overlooked. A tra- 

 dition exists of one Ochter, a Norwegian, of King Alfred's 



* The gigantic whales that inhabit the Indian Ocean are probably of 

 this genus. One was stranded on the Chittagong coast in August 1842, 

 which measured ninety feet in length and forty-two in diameter ; and 

 another on the coast of Aracan in 1851, which was eighty -four feet 

 long. (See Zoologist for December 1859, p. 6778.) 



