1826.] Land Bears of fVater Original? 391 



says Mr. Hunter, " resembles that of a quadruped." " The heart is 

 inclosed in the pericardium, &c. as in the human body." " The breasts 

 of the female resemble those of a cow, having similar nipples." 



In reality, the Whale may be regarded as a sea bull, and the female 

 may be added to the long catalogue of sea cotvs, already in the possession 

 of the naturalist. The flesh of the Whale is not to be eaten for Jish, 

 unless by the aid of that Jiction of the table, an example of which is 

 given in the anecdote of the feasting of an eminent Italian ecclesiastic, 

 upon a maigre day, when the generous host announced every viand as 

 fish, and the uninquisitive guest ate it as Jish accordingly ! The 

 flesh of the Whale, the Swan, the Peacock, and some others, now 

 rejected for their coarseness, and also of the Sturgeon at this day, were 

 formerly esteemed luxuries for the table; and hence the Whale is 

 esteemed a royal fish, or royal prize if found upon the coast of England. 

 The law gives to the king the anterior part of the body, and to his 

 queen consort the tail ; and the strange mistake wliich is continually re- 

 peated in our books, respecting the signification of this division, is to be 

 accounted for, perhaps, only by the great lapse of years since, through 

 a squeamish alteration in the royal palate, Whale-flesh has been dressed 

 in the royal kitchen I Even with this apology, in the mean time, except 

 by recurring to that complacency in which books so continually suppose 

 in our ancestors the most egregious and consummate ignorance (and that, 

 too, upon subjects with respect to which, as in the present instance, 

 those ancestors are always likely to have been better informed than our- 

 selves), and to that other propensity, so frequently manifest in the 

 learned, to choose uniformly (where there is a good explanation and a 

 bad one) the bad in preference to the good ; consistently with what 

 Seneca tells us of mankind, whose lot, according to him, it is, not only 

 to wander in error, but to love error better than truth : without some or 

 all of these apologies, it is difficult to explain the grave comment which 

 is made and echoed upon the legal adjudication of the tail of the WTiale 

 to the queen-consorts of England! It is gravely inferred, upon this 

 matter, that the tail of the Whale was given to the queen, as containing 

 the bone which would be useful for her stay-making, and that our ances- 

 tors were unhappily ignorant of the fact, that this bone lay precisely in 

 the head of the Whale, and not in the opposite extremity ! But why 

 has it not been recollected that eating is older than stay-making ; that 

 there were stomachs before stomachers ; that " lips, though blooming, 

 must still be fed ;" and that queen-consorts had need of slices of Wliale's- 

 flesh, before they wanted laminae of WTialebone ! The truth, undenia- 

 bly, is, that the monarch, both in his gallantry and in his robustness, 

 was content with any of the parts of the WTiale which reached his plate, 

 or at least his fingers ; that he had " stomach for them all ;" while, 

 like the cock purveying for his hens in the barn-yard, or like what 

 every "Whale-eating gentleman should show an equal example of, the 

 tail was picked out as a tit-bit for the royal lady I The tail of the 

 Whale is decidedly the greatest delicacy in the whole dish, unless a word 

 were to be put in for the " white sinews" that connect the plates of 

 Whalebone in the mouth, which, says Martens, "are of an agreeable 

 smell, break very easily, and may be boiled and eaten." As to the rest, 

 the following particulars, from the same author, will show, at once, that 

 Whale's flesh is not Jish, and the Queens of England and of all Europe 

 ought to be helped to the tail, in preference to any other selection. 



