CHAPTER I. 



ON THE CATODON AUSTRALIS. 



Whatever friendship or familicarity whales and dolphins 

 may, according to ancient writers, have had with men in the 

 olden time, it is very certain that the human species, with the 

 exception of a few sailors, have very littie acquaintance with 

 their "fat friends" in these days. Even whalers in general know 

 little more of them than their oil. While a lion or a tiger has 

 become quite a vulgar animal in our menageries, there are 

 few persons who have seen a live cetacean in captivity, except 

 Gesner, or rather Rondelet, (whom Gesner, in the passage 

 alluded to, seems to be quoting,) who states, that in his day, 

 his countrymen were in the habit of carrying live dolphins as 

 far into the interior as Lyons ! It may indeed, happen, that 

 the veracity of old Conrad's book, is as little to be trusted to 

 in this story,* as in its pictorial representations of the whale 

 tribe. At least, in the present railroad times, when a live 

 hippopotamus is sporting in the midst of London, the most of 

 the external aspect of a cetacean that any Cockney has yet 

 seen, has been presented to his wondering gaze by some 

 distorted skin. And this is one of the reasons why the figures 

 of the sperm whale given by Beale and Frederic Cuvier are 

 so widely different from each other, as to make it almost 

 incredible that they should have b^een intended for the same 

 species. By such misshapen masses of stuffing so little accurate 

 information is afforded to the zoologist, that he is of necessity 

 obliged to have recourse to the skeleton. 



But when he takes this step in search of knowledge, the 

 naturalist finds the osteology of cetaceous animals to be a very 

 difficult pursuit, not merely on account of the general 



* Hist. Anim., 1558, lib. iv. p. 387. 

 B 



