WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES 



face of a whale might be best described as that of a 

 creature with a left nostril only, at the top of its nose, a 

 receding chin, and something resembling a hare-lip. 



The back of this whale with a small fin, is raised in a 

 series of low irregular humps posteriorly. The pectoral 

 fins are broad and about six feet long. Sperm whales 

 occur in all seas except the Arctic and Antarctic, but 

 they are essentially creatures of the tropics. Sperm whales 

 swim in herds or schools which are much diversified in 

 character. Some comprise only young males; others 

 females and their young led by one old bull, as a kind of 

 * 'schoolmaster" or mentor; others consist entirely of old 

 males. These old bulls do not always swim together. They 

 are often encountered wandering singly, as if they had 

 lost all interest in their fellow creatures. They are ill- 

 tempered and very pugnacious, and do not hesitate to 

 attack the boats of the whalers. 



The sperm whale feeds mainly on big squids. Its 

 great strength and powerful under-teeth enable it to 

 dislodge them from their rocky retreats at the bottom 

 of the sea. 



The bottlenosed whales comprise four or five genera 

 of small whales — none of them exceed forty feet in 

 length. They are toothed, like the sperm whale, but 

 never have more than four teeth (regularly implanted in 

 their jaws) although some species have numbers of tiny 

 rudimentary teeth, which seem to be useless, imbedded 

 in their lips. The head of all the forms, at least in the 

 young, is pointed. In the bottlenosed whale of the North 

 Atlantic the forehead gradually increases in size with 

 age, so that the creature literally grows a beak, strong 

 and narrow and somewhat resembling the shoulder and 

 neck of a bottle : a development which gives the animal 

 its name. The beaked whales of other genera are much 

 less abundant. They travel, both in groups and in pairs. 



One bottlenose, described by John Hunter (the British 

 anatomist and surgeon who did valuable work in his 



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