Beyond the Horizon 261 



the profitable business of hunting and killing these crea- 

 tures. That was in the seventeenth century when the 

 whale fishery was at its height; to-day the Greenland 

 whale is practically extinct. It has entirely disappeared 

 from the region of Spitzbergen and the waters of 

 Greenland where it once existed in such plenty, and 

 now only a few small wandering herds may occasionally 

 be encountered in the neighborhood of Bering Sea. 



This species {Balana mysketus) is the largest of the 

 right whales, reaching a length of about fifty feet. 

 Over the back and sides it is a deep blue black, under- 

 neath it is gray, while the neck and throat are white. 

 The enormous head fully exceeds a third of the crea- 

 ture's total length. Actually, the cavity of the mouth 

 is larger than that of the body. Yet as gigantic as are 

 the jaws of this animal, the gullet is comparatively 

 diminutive, being less than two inches in diameter, and 

 it subsists on nothing but very small organisms. Its 

 food consists principally of minute crustaceans and free- 

 swimming mollusks (pteropods), which swarm in im- 

 mense shoals in the colder seas. In the capture of its 

 food, the value of its inordinately large mouth becomes 

 at once apparent. It is thereby enabled to engulf at 

 one time a sufficient quantity of water containing the 

 organisms. When the creature closes its jaws, these 

 are held in by the straining action of the whalebone 

 which allows only the water to pass through and out at 

 the sides of the mouth. The whalebone blades in the 

 animal are not exactly as they appear in the article with 

 which we are all more or less familiar; they are here 

 frayed out at one — the inner — edge and at the ends 

 into long soft and silky but extremely tough hairs. 



