HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 23 



The reader might well think that, since whales have been caught in 

 their thousands from the fourteenth century on, their structure and habits 

 must have been described in detail by whalers and biologists of the time, 

 but if he does, he will be disappointed. True, the books on fish by Belon 

 (1553) and Rondelet (1554) rejected medieval fable and fantasy and, for 

 the first time in more than fifteen hundred years, gave a useful and 

 accurate description of Cetaceans, but Greenland whaling which, after 

 all, was so important to England, Holland, and Germany, was carried 

 on for almost a century before the first book on the subject appeared in 

 1675. It was called Spitzbergische Reisebeschreibung and was written by a 

 Hamburg barber and surgeon, Friedrich Martens. Clearly, scientists 

 attached little importance to the Arctic, and since ship's surgeons were 

 barbers rather than physicians they were quite indifferent to animal 

 biology. Martens was the first to describe the characteristics of the 

 Greenland and Biscayan Whales accurately, but his work was very 

 quickly outstripped by Sibbald's Phalaenologia nova (London 1692). 



The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were of the greatest impor- 

 tance to the study of human anatomy. It was the age of V^esalius, of 

 Ruysch and of Nicolaas Tulp, the Dutch anatomist, whose fame was 

 immortalized in Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson. It was the age in which 

 dissections of human bodies had become a kind of ritual, and it is there- 

 fore not surprising that the work was extended to animals as well, and 

 particularly to porpoises, which were caught and sold all over Europe, 

 so that there was no lack of illustrative material. The first known dissec- 

 tion was carried out in 1654, when Bartholinus dissected a porpoise in the 

 presence of King Frederick III of Denmark. Thereafter our knowledge of 

 the structure of the animal was greatly amplified by the writings of Ray 

 (1671), Major (1672) and Tyson (i860). In the eighteenth century 

 Frisch and De la Motte (1740) both gave descriptions of the porpoise. 

 Little, however, was written about the great whales. True, Zorgdrager 

 (1728) and Fabricius (1780), in their detailed accounts of Greenland 

 whaling, mention quite a few salient facts, but they were far more con- 

 cerned with the industry than with the structure and habits of its victims. 

 Anthony van Leeuwenhoek investigated the structure of a whale eye 

 brought to him pickled in brandy by a whaling captain. Field woi-k must 

 indeed have been very difficult, if we reflect that one young ship's 

 surgeon whom the great John Hunter instructed to collect and presei've 

 specimens returned with no more than a piece of whale skin covered with 

 parasites. It all seems very strange, for the whalers themselves brought back 

 all kinds of trophies : jaws, vertebrae, scapulae and parts of the ear. The 

 jaws were frequently used as gate posts or as rubbing posts for cattle 

 (Fig. 162). In fact, complete young whales were sometimes brought back 



