50 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



exactly. The animal eats fish and swallows them whole, head first. 

 In contrast to the bumbling porpoise, dolphins prefer the open water 

 to the coastal shallows, and pursue their food in companies, some- 

 times of enormous numbers. They are extremely swift animals, hav- 

 ing been observed to keep up with a ship doing eighteen knots and 

 then suddenly to dart ahead and disappear into the blue. Their 

 strength, or rather their "drive," is quite phenomenal. One that had 

 been caught around the tail by a chance slip-knot in a rope set off 

 for the open sea down a channel, towing a twenty-three-foot motor 

 launch, and traversed a three-mile course between marking buoys 

 known to the fishermen in the boat at a rate of slightly over five 

 knots, and this when the tail, which is the animal's "propeller" and 

 sole device for causing forward movement, was hindered by the 

 rope dragging the boat! 



A single youngster is born at a time. It is about two feet in length 

 and has the distinction of bearing a small mustache composed of half 

 a dozen hairs on each side of its snout. The mother is most solicitous 

 of her offspring, keeping it beside her always, and for a long time 

 even feeding it with stunned fish when it is being weaned, which 

 was another habit that delighted the ancients. Despite the fact that 

 prehistoric fishermen knew the dolphin had lungs, breathed air, bore 

 its young alive, and suckled them with milk, they persisted in classing 

 the animal as a fish. However, its many unfishlike ways, and notably 

 its warm blood, never ceased to mystify them, and these characters, 

 combined with its habit of accompanying ships, soon convinced them 

 that these creatures were endowed with a special intelligence akin to 

 their own and that, as a result, they were particularly solicitous of 

 man's welfare. Nonetheless, they fished for the poor animal on ac- 

 count of its teeth, which were used for personal adornment, for its 

 meat, which they sun-dried and salted as described by Xenophon, 

 who ate some and made a number of extremely unflattering remarks 

 about its toughness and subsequent unwholesomeness, and for its oil, 

 and especially that of its liver. That gullible old Roman gentleman, 

 Pliny the Elder, whom we shall soon meet more intimately, records 

 that people boiled dolphin livers to obtain an oil which was highly 

 efficacious in the removal of "lichens and other leprous spots." 

 We may well wonder if the spots in question were not the out- 

 ward manifestations of some vitamin deficiency that was counter- 



