HISTORY AND DETAILS OF WHALING. 259 



to leave room for the oil. Taking as an example that of an 

 individual covered with an external layer of fat, we find we 

 can trace the true skin without any difficulty, leaving a thick 

 layer of cellular membrane loaded with fat, of the same nature 

 as that in the other parts of the body ; on the contrary, in the 

 whale, it is altogether impossible to raise any layer of skin dis- 

 tinct from the rest of the blubber, however thick it may be ; 

 and, in flensing a whale the operator removes this blubber or 

 skin from the muscular parts beneath, merely dividing with 

 his spade the connecting cellular membrane. 



11 Such a structure as this, being firm and elastic in the high- 

 est degree, operates like so much india rubber, possessing a 

 density and power of resistance which increases with the 

 pressure. But this thick coating of fat subserves other im- 

 portant uses. An inhabitant of seas where the cold is most 

 intense, yet warm blooded, and dependent for existence on 

 keeping up the animal heat, the whale is furnished in this 

 thick wrapper with a substance which resists the abstraction of 

 heat from the body as fast as it is generated, and thus is kept 

 comfortably warm in the fiercest polar winters. Again, the 

 oil contained in the cells of the skin, being superficially lighter 

 than water, adds to the buoyancy of the animal, and thus 

 saves much muscular exertion in swimming horizontally and 

 in rising to the surface ; the bones, being of a porous or spongy 

 texture, have a similar influence." 



Enemies of the Whale. " The whales, gigantic as they 

 are, and little disposed to injure creatures less in bulk and 

 power than themselves, find, however, to their cost, in common 

 with nobler creatures, that harmlessness is often no defence 

 against violence. Several species of the voracious sharks make 

 the whale the object of their peculiar attacks ; the arctic shark 

 is said, with its serrated teeth, to scoop out hemispherical pieces 

 of flesh from the whale's body as big as a man's head, and to 

 proceed without any mercy until its appetite is satiated. 



"Another shark, called the thrasher, which is upwards of 



