APPENDIX D 



Comparative Si'x^s of Whales 



MANY astonishing facts become evident from a chart such as that 

 shown opposite. First, it may come as a great surprise to find that 

 the average whale hunted throughout the ages until the introduction of 

 the modern steam chaser was, comparatively speaking, a "small" whale 

 in point of length and much more so in point of bulk. The average 

 sperm, black right, and even arctic right seldom exceeds sixty feet in 

 length, while the record blue was only a few feet short of double that 

 length. The rights are excessively bulky for their length but, on the 

 grounds of solid geometry, their volume is still less for their over-all size 

 than is that of the mighty rorquals. 



Second, we will see that there are two notable gaps in standard whale 

 size. One is the hundred-foot length and the other the seventy-foot. Al- 

 though whales of both dimensions are recorded, there are none that 

 normally grow to these sizes. This may seem strange, even to the biolo- 

 gist, but not quite so strange to engineers or mathematicians. If the vol- 

 ume of spindle-shaped objects such as whales be plotted on a graph ad- 

 justed to take into account a number of known factors, it will be 

 found that significant changes in shape, proportions, and dimensions are 

 called for about these as well as at other less important points. There 

 are, in fact, at least four kinds of whales, from the point of view 

 of mere size — the tiny, which are nothing more than land animals 

 adapted to an aquatic existence; the small, from fifteen to twenty-five 

 feet in length, which are really giant mammals buoyed up by the water; 

 the large, from twenty-five to fifty-five feet in length, which use volume 

 to overcome certain difficulties of size; and the giant, from sixty to 

 ninety feet in length, which keep down their geometric bulk by in- 

 creasing their length and adopting another form. Over and above these, 

 there can be the supergiant, which, if common, would constitute a fifth 

 class, but which are today, as far as we know, only exceptions. There 

 presumably is no limit to size in the oceans, but there probably are 



