122 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



At birth the teeth are not erupted, nor were they present in the young sucking calf 

 described by Wheeler (1933). According to Bennett (1836), who states that, "when the 

 young cachalot has attained a length of 34 feet, its teeth are perfectly formed, though not 

 visible until it exceeds 28 feet", the teeth are erupted between the lengths of 8-6 and 

 10-4 m. Even allowing for differences in the method of measuring total length, these 

 lengths appear to be excessive. The smallest Sperm whale of the present series had 

 erupted teeth. It was a male 8-8 m. in length. The smallest female, though only 9-5 m. 

 long, had a full set of teeth and was pregnant and therefore adult or at least sexually 

 mature. On the other hand, in an immature male 10-4 m. in length, though the teeth 

 were erupted, they were only 2 cm. in height. It would therefore appear that the teeth 

 erupt slowly. On three occasions, all in male South African whales, teeth with secondary 

 cusps which gave the appearance of double teeth were observed in the lower jaw. 



The lips of the upper jaw are frequently notched or abraded by the teeth through 

 lateral movement of the lower jaw. 



In none of the body proportions or other characters examined above does there appear 

 to be any difference between the Sperm whales of the northern and southern hemi- 

 spheres. 



SPERMACETI 



Nowadays the spermaceti is not usually preserved separately from the oil at the 

 whaling stations. In the old pelagic Sperm whaling industry the spermaceti was dipped 

 out of the head with buckets and casked by itself. The present procedure is to boil the 

 spermaceti with the head and part of the meat. Plate VIII, fig. i is a photograph of the 

 spermaceti being run from the head into a boiler on a floating factory. The head lies to 

 the left, and the open top of the boiler can be seen in the lower right-hand corner. The 

 man in the centre has just cut off the anterior part of the head, allowing the contained 

 spermaceti to gush out into the boiler. 



FOOD 



The stomachs of nearly all Sperm whales examined contained the remains of cephalo- 

 pods, only eleven, out of the seventy-four from which data were recorded, being empty. 

 Table VIII summarizes the information collected. The Sperm whales, as was to be 

 expected, were found to be feeding both at South Georgia and off the African coast, 

 thus differing from the balaenopterid whales which feed little off South Africa owing to 

 the scarcity of euphausians. The stomachs examined at South Georgia appear to contain 

 cephalopod beaks much more frequently than those from South Africa : no satisfactory 

 explanation has been found for this, nor for the fact that some stomachs contained only 

 a few, and others several hundreds of beaks. The size of the cephalopods usually eaten 

 does not appear to be very large, the general run averaging probably not more than 

 about I m. in body length. Very large cephalopods were represented only by beaks in 

 the stomachs and scars on the skin ; no soft parts were found. Nearly all male Sperm 

 whales carry scars caused by the suckers and claws of large squids, scars caused by 

 suckers up to 10 cm. in diameter being common. The claw marks take the form of 



