Twilight in the South -i^-i,-] 



but leaving the skin widespread. It is not known what purpose these 

 structures may serve but, of all the theories I have encountered, one 

 though fantastic might possibly warrant some consideration. This 

 is that these animals have no means of braking or coming to a dead 

 stop, but that they often have to do so to avoid enemies, flirtatious 

 members of the opposite sex, or the sea bottom, or to come to grips 

 with shoals of food. The theory is that, at such times of emergency, 

 they open their mouths and throats so that water by the ton can 

 rush in to both; whereupon the whole front end of the animal blows 

 out like a parachute, due to the separation of the "pleats," and brings 

 the two-hundred-ton submarine to a dead stop. It is a nice idea, but 

 there is not a shred of evidence to support it. However, there is not 

 an iota of real information about any other suggested use for these 

 structures either. The finner has about one hundred pleats, and they 

 first become visible in the embryo when it is only two feet long. 

 The blue has about sixty. 



The baby blue is some twenty-five feet long at birth, is nursed 

 for seven months, and is over fifty feet long when weaned. Rather 

 delightfully, it has a parody of a mustache consisting of just eleven 

 hairs on the upper jaw and four on either side of the lower. Finner 

 babies are only a little smaller than blues at birth, averaging about 

 twenty-two feet, and they are stated to be weaned in six months. 

 Both appear to become sexually mature at three years, but they seem 

 to keep on growing throughout life, as do many amphibious crea- 

 tures. This does not mean, however, that age is calculable by size 

 alone, for whales vary in every imaginable way. No two are exactly 

 alike any more than we are, and the degree of variety among even 

 a single pod is excessive. Color, shape, the length and size of flipper, 

 fin, and tail flukes, over-all bulk, color of baleen, number of pleats, 

 and numerous other features are highly variable. Ancient ones may 

 be of modest proportions; obviously young ones, of large size. The 

 "experts" constantly state that both blues and finners have a life 

 span of about twenty years, but, on the one hand, no marked indi- 

 vidual has been retrieved after any such length of time, while, on the 

 other hand, such knowledgeable people as the Eskimos maintain, 

 though, of course, for no reasons that are acceptable to our mathe- 

 matical universe, that these animals have exactly the same life span as 

 men. The speed with which they grow casts doubt upon such an 



