HIMSELF 3 



and his oil better and more abundant than that of other whales. 

 As a matter of fact, sperm oil is distinctly superior to any other 

 whale oil, and the bowhead, which is really only a larger right 

 whale, has the longest and finest ''bone'' there is, but the name 

 "right" was given to the North Atlantic fellow long before 

 either of these other whales was known. There are, as I said, 

 three accepted forms of right whale, but the differences between 

 them, excepting that of habitat, are slight and of small impor- 

 tance to the whaleman. Variations in the shape of head, in the 

 proportions of head and body, and in the number of vertebrse 

 are not such matters as seriously concern a whaler; to him it is 

 far more important that the bowhead is more wary, hence more 

 difficult to take; that in the southern right whale the baleen is 

 somewhat shorter and coarser, and that the bowhead is found 

 in Arctic seas, the North Atlantic right whale mainly in tem- 

 perate waters, and the southerner in the Antarctic and sub- 

 Antarctic. Each of the three forms, of course, has an enormous 

 head, and the enormous jaw that produces the so-called ''bone." 

 Indeed, in the bowhead the head is more than one third 

 of the beast's total length. His upper jaw is very narrow but is 

 roofed high, and in this high roof the whalebone plates are 

 formed. These plates are triangular, and broadest where they 

 are attached; they are necessarily set very close together, for 

 on each side of the jaw there are between three and four hundred 

 of them. They hang down from the palate like a great fringe, 

 longest in the middle of the mouth, where they may be from ten 

 to fourteen feet long — in other right whales, rarely above seven 

 feet long — and perhaps a quarter of that length at each end of the 

 mouth. On their outer side, the blades are hard and straight; 

 on the inner side they are frayed out almost to hairs. The right 

 whale feeds on certain very minute crustaceans or, in whale- 

 man's vernacular, "brit," or "right-whale feed," which swarm 

 in such immense shoals as to "dye the Arctic Sea for acres." 

 He rushes through the sea, close to the surface, with jaws 

 apart, and takes in a vast bulk of this food and a considerable 

 quantity of water with it; then, as the great jaws shut, the tooth- 

 less lower jaw, with its big lip rising stiffly above it, forces the 



