338 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



idea, for it does seem to be a rule that the faster an animal matures, 

 the shorter time it lasts. Man and the Indian elephant have exactly 

 the same rate of growth and the same life expectancy. Size has noth- 

 ing to do with the matter. 



The so-called blue whale is indeed a beautiful blue-gray color in 

 life, darker above and so much lighter below as to be almost white, 

 though the whole is basically dappled with pale gray, which, of 

 course, shows more prominently on the light underside. The finner 

 is dark slate gray above and glistening white below, but almost in- 

 variably displays a remarkable asymmetry of pattern. The right side 

 of the head is usually lighter than the left, but there are also "left- 

 hand" individuals. Bryde's Whale, which is a small (forty feet) slen- 

 der creature, is blue-black above and pure white below, with a dusky 

 bluish area under the throat and a gray band across the belly just 

 in front of the navel. 



The scientific naming of the blue and finner present the layman 

 with almost insurmountable problems. If one is interested in whales 

 at all, one ought at least to know what the two most important ani- 

 mals concerned in the business today might be, but if we should list 

 all the names that have been applied to them in both popular and 

 scientific literature, current and historic, we would fill three pages of 

 text. The Blue is now known as Balaenoptera musculus, the Finner 

 as Balaenoptera physalus, but all manner of other Latin names, both 

 generic and specific, are extant for both. Make no mistake about the 

 fact that there are two animals, which do not interbreed, both of 

 which are found throughout the world, but mostly in cold waters, 

 while one is large and the other is larger. 



Both animals, like almost all other whales, migrate annually back 

 and forth to north and south contrarily in the two hemispheres, 

 though the movements of these two species are confined to voyages 

 between cold and very cold waters, the animals going to the latter 

 in the warm season and to the former in the cold season. Neverthe- 

 less, I have personally cruised past school after school of rorquals in 

 the tropical Atlantic doldrums where the surface waters were so 

 warm one could hardly cool off by falling into them from the 

 canvas-shaded deck of a sun-drenched schooner under a cloudless 

 sky. There is still a very great deal that we don't know about the 

 habits of the commonest whales. 



