§ 423, 424. THE SPECIFIC GRAVITY OF THE SEA, ETC. 205 



the whales passed from one side to the other, since the stricken 

 animal could not have had the harpoon in him long enough to 

 admit of a passage around either Cape Horn or the Cape of Good 

 Ilope. 



423. The whale-fishing is, among the industrial pursuits of the 

 iiarpoons-habitsof sca, ouc of uo little Importaucc j and when the sys- 

 the whales. ^^^^ ^f investigation out of which the " Wind and 

 Current Charts" have grown was commenced, the haunts of this 

 animal did not escape attentive examination. The log-books of 

 whalers were collected in great numbers, and patiently exam- 

 ined, co-ordinated, and discussed, in order to find out what parts 

 of the ocean are frequented by this kind of whale, what parts by 

 that, and what parts by neither. (See Plate IX.) Log-books 

 containing the records by different ships for hundreds of thou- 

 sands of days were examined, and the observations in them co- 

 ordinated for this chart. And this investigation, as Plate IX. 

 shows, led to the discovery that the tropical regions of the ocean 

 are to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which he can not 

 pass, and into which he never enters. The fact was also brought 

 out that the same kind of whale that is found off the shores of 

 Greenland, in Baf&n's Bay, etc., is found also in the North Pacific, 

 and about Behring's Strait, and that the right whale of the north- 

 ern hemisphere is a different animal from that of the southern. 

 Thus the fact was established that the harpooned whales did not 

 pass around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, for they were 

 of the class that could not cross the equator. In this way we 

 were furnished with circumstantial evidence afibrding the most 

 irrefragable proof that there is, at times at least, open water com- 

 munication through the Arctic Sea from one side of the continent 

 to the other, for it is known that the whales can not travel under 

 tlie ice for such a great distance as is that from one side of this 

 continent to the other. But this did not prove the existence of 

 an open sea there; it only established the existence — the occa- 

 sional existence, if you please — of a channel through which 

 whales had passed. Therefore we felt bound to introduce other 

 evidence before we could expect the reader to admit our proof, 

 and to believe with us in the existence of an open sea in the Arc- 

 tic Ocean. 



424. There is an under current setting from the Atlantic through 



