WHALE, 729 
Lamb about her brother, ‘“‘ he took to water like a hungry otter, 
abstaining from all spirituous liquors; but with the most 
indifferent results, as he became full of cramps, and rheumatism, 
and so cold internally that fire could not warm him. 
WHALE, Balena mysticetus. (And see Fisu). 
THE old Romans made use of Whale flesh as food, cooking it in 
various ways. Throughout England it was at one time custom- 
ary to get similar food from the fishermen of Normandy, but 
the practice is no longer continued. Whale skin abounds in 
gelatine, and will make when stewed a most excellent jelly. 
The fish is graminivorous, its products being train oil, and 
sperm, baleen (whalebone), spermaceti and ambergris. “ Whale- 
bone” formerly meant ivory, as supposed to be derived from 
the bones of a whale, when the source of this material was 
little known, and when most of the ivory used in Western 
Europe came from the teeth of the Walrus. Shakespeare’s lines 
in Love's Labour Lost bear reference to this fact :— 
“* This (says Biron) is the flower that smiles on every one 
To show his teeth as white as whale’s bone.” 
A remarkable Whale cure for chromic rheumatism has been 
known to American whalemen for some years. When a whale 
is killed, and towed ashore, (it does not matter whether it is a 
right humpback, a finback, or a sperm whale), and while the 
interior of the carcase still retains some warmth, a hole is cut 
through one side of the whale, sufficiently large to admit the 
lower half of the patient’s body, from the loins to the feet; so 
that thus far he shall sink into the creature’s intestines by the 
feet foremost, leaving the head and partly the shoulders outside 
the aperture. This hole is then closed up as completely as 
possible ; otherwise the patient would not be able to breathe 
because of the volume of ammoniacal gas which would escape 
from the interior through every crevice of the opening lett. 
It is these gases, which are of an overpowering and atrocious 
odour, which bring about the cure, so the whalemen declare. 
Sometimes the patient cannot stand such horrible immersion 
for more than an hour, and has to be lifted out in a fainting state ; 
and to undergo a second, third, and perhaps even a fourth course 
on the same day, or on the day following. Twenty, or thirty 
