3IO FOLLOW THE WHALE 



don't quite understand but which in the case of the mammoth has 

 been very succinctly propounded by Tolmacheff , those types simply 

 could no longer breed fast enough to maintain their numbers, and 

 when the number of individuals of any species drops below a cer- 

 tain critical point, that species heads rapidly to extinction. In the 

 case of the so-called dinosaurs, a brief cold period, combined with 

 the depredations of small mammals upon their large eggs, may have 

 hastened the process; in that of the mammoth, slaughter in pits by 

 primitive man may have helped; but in both cases the creatures were 

 apparently already doomed by some natural law of birth and growth, 

 decline and death that applies to all of life. Extinction has nothing 

 to do with sheer size, though bulk over certain Hmits is not efficient 

 on this planet. Countless other types, great, medium, and small, have 

 likewise vanished, but whales, despite their highly specialized form 

 and, in some cases, their truly vast bulk, are apparently not yet 

 scheduled for extinction. Happily, they have not yet run their full 

 course, and they still seem to have a remarkable, inherent, individual 

 virility and a pronounced specific vitality. The sperms have made 

 such a comeback in the last half century that a modern, though hm- 

 ited, industry has now again been created upon their capture and 

 products. 



It is to be hoped that the rorquals will display a similar virility, 

 for products derived from them are still sorely needed, and they 

 have, from a purely aesthetic point of view, considerable intrinsic 

 value of their own. There is nothing that reduces man to his proper 

 dimensions more rapidly and completely than contemplation of a 

 fully-grown blue whale at play in the open ocean, and nothing 

 humbles man quite so readily as the sight of one of these animals 

 on land. Man needs no one thing more than humility. At the same 

 time, the larger whales present the greatest challenge to our physical 

 prowess and mental agility, and their pursuit and capture provide 

 probably the greatest release for our puerile, but nonetheless real, 

 striving for conquest. The best man to guide the first rocket ship to 

 the mioon or to Mars would probably be a young whale-chaser cap- 

 tain. Despite the proportionately puny equipment of the early whal- 

 ers which was pitted against the scared and bumbling right whales 

 and the slightly more efficient but more massive devices the whalers 



