300 ANDREW JACKSON HOWE. 



and Antarctic seas will weigh about one hundred 

 tons. This Leviathan this monster of the deep is 

 edentate ; it has no well developed teeth. Its food is 

 jelly-fishes and minute mollusks caught by a balleen 

 strainer. The gigantic mammalian travels with the 

 speed of the swiftest express train, and even faster. 

 If a whale eighty feet long should engage in a race 

 with the Etruria, to cross the Atlantic, leaving New 

 York at the same time, the cetacean would swim to 

 Queenstown, back to New York, and then reach the 

 vessel in the fogs of the Grand Banks. The whale 

 moving at a moderate rate of speed, and hunting for 

 jelly-fish, breathes once in three or four minutes, or 

 once while making three or four miles. The pectoral 

 fins or flippers are not used to effect headway, but to 

 poise the body in the water; the tail as a propeller 

 not moving in lateral strokes as does the tail of a fish, 

 but striking the moving blows downward and upward. 

 In Puget Sound I saw a whale scoop in a jelly-fish 

 that would seemingly fill a hogshead. A square rod 

 or more of the surface looked smooth as if oil had 

 been poured upon the water. This the passing whale 

 saw when its head was shoved above the surface to 

 blow, and it then turned to swallow the food. In two 

 minutes the cetacean rose to blow again at a distance 

 of at least three miles away, and in the direction of 

 Alaskan w r aters. 



A strange group of undeveloped pelvic bones are 

 found in the after part of the body. These are utterly 

 useless, so far as can be estimated, and convey the 

 idea that the creature was not an original creative 

 conception, but a modification from something higher 

 or lower. In organization the whale is nearest allied 

 to the seal. Perhaps the sea-lion is the indirect de- 



