THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN. 381 



is four feet thick, and is mainly blubber interpenetrated by 

 fibrous, muscular flesh. 



The lips and throat of a two -hundred -and -fifty -barrel 

 whale should yield sixty barrels of oil, and, with the support- 

 ing jaw-bones, i i, will weigh as much as twenty-five oxen of 

 one thousand pounds each. Attached to the throat by a 

 broad base is the enormous tongue, the size of which can be 

 better conceived by the fact that twenty-five barrels of oil 

 have been taken from one. Such a tongue would equal in 

 weight ten oxen. The spread of lips, as the whale plows 

 through the fields of "brit," is about thirty feet. Some- 

 times in feeding the whale turns on its side, so as to lay the 

 longer axis of the cavity of the mouth horizontally. Keep- 

 ing the lower lip closed, and the upper one thrown off, -and 

 standing perpendicularly, it scoops along just under the sur- 

 face where the " brit " is always most densely packed. After 

 thus sifting a track of the sea fifteen feet wide and a quarter 

 of a mile in length, the water foaming through the slatted 

 bone, and packing the mollusks upon the hair-sieve, the whale 

 raises the lower jaw; but still keeping the lips apart, it 

 forces the spongy tongue into the cavity of the sieve, driv- 

 ing the water with great force through the spaces between 

 the bone. Then, closing the lips, it disposes of the catch, 

 and repeats the operation until satiated. 



By these details I have striven to convey an idea of the 

 completeness and the immensity of the apparatus by which 

 this largest of animals is enabled to glean\ a plentiful harvest 

 of the smallest creatures of the sea. 



The tail of such a whale is about twenty-five feet broad 

 and six feet deep, and considerably more forked than that 

 of the spermaceti. The point of junction with the body is 

 about four feet in diameter, the vertebra about fifteen inches ; 

 the remainder of the small being packed with rope-like ten- 

 dons from the size of a finger to that of a man's leg. The 



