382 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



forty tubes, each hollow and divided throughout the whole 

 length into many cells by small partitions, like the tubes of 

 Confervcs. ... A Portuguese, who came on board the ship 

 at Rio de Janeiro, told me that at San Salvador, on the 

 coast of Brazil, where the Portuguese have a whale fishery, 

 he had often seen vast quantities of it taken out of the 

 stomachs of whales or grampuses." When one remembers 

 the minute size of the individual tubes and the kind of 

 microscope Banks must have had, the description is mar- 

 vellously accurate. This observation as to a Protophyte 

 being found in quantity in the stomachs of whales is in- 

 teresting in connection with the name of "whales' food" 

 given to the masses of diatoms in the Arctic Seas. It was 

 pointed out by the late Mr. R. Brown (Campst.) in 1868 

 {Trans. Bot. Soc. Edin., vol. ix.) that the well-known dis- 

 coloration of tracts of the Arctic Sea is owinof- to diatom 

 life — principally the diatom now known as Thalassiosira 

 Nordeiiskioldii. He found this and other diatoms in the 

 intestinal canal of the small Entomostraca, Pteropodous 

 Mollusca, Medusae, etc. (the true whales' food), which fre- 

 quent the discoloured tracts, and in turn live upon the 

 diatoms. Thus it comes about that organisms, which in- 

 dividually are invisible without a high power of the micro- 

 scope, ultimately furnish the food of the mightiest animals 

 on our crlobe. In the Antarctic Seas the whales feed on 

 minute animals closely allied to those of the Arctic, and 

 these without doubt also subsist on the extensive tracts 

 of diatoms of the southern ocean with which Sir Joseph 

 Hooker himself, as it happens, first made us acquainted. 

 The whales must inevitably swallow large quantities of the 

 diatoms themselves in pursuit of the minute animals, as was 

 probably the case with the whales mentioned by Banks, 

 and it is possible that the mixed animal and vegetable diet 

 may be beneficial. This observation of Banks is cited 

 merely as showing the living interest his Journal possesses 

 to students of the sea at the present day. There are few 

 pages of it that do not show him to be, as Sir Joseph 

 Hooker truly says, ''the pioneer of those naturalist voyagers 

 of later years, of whom Darwin is the great example ". 



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