THE WHALE 



; Oh, the rare old Whale, 'mid storm and gale, 



In his ocean home will be 

 A giant in might where might is right, 



And King of the boundless sea." 



From " Moby Dick." 



|O ANIMAL in prehistoric or historic times has ever exceeded 

 " the whale, in either size or strength, which explains perhaps 

 its survival from ancient times. Few people have any idea 

 of the relative size of the whale compared with other ani- 

 mals. A large specimen weighs about ninety tons, or thirty 

 times as much as an elephant, which beside a whale appears about as 

 large as a dog compared to an elephant. It is equivalent in bulk to 

 one hundred oxen, and outweighs a village of one thousand people. If 

 cut into steaks and eaten, as in Japan, it would supply a meal to an 

 army of one hundred and twenty thousand men. 



A French lithograph showing the comparative sizes of a whale, an elephant 

 a horse, and a giraffe. 



Whales have often exceeded one hundred feet in length, and George 

 Brown Goode, in his report on the United States Fisheries, mentions a 

 finback having been killed that was one hundred and twenty feet long. 

 A whale's head is sometimes thirty-five feet in circumference, weighs 

 thirty tons, and has jaws twenty feet long, which open thirty feet wide 

 to a mouth that is as large as a room twenty feet long, fifteen feet 

 high, nine feet wide at the bottom, and two feet wide at the top. A 

 score of Jonahs standing upright would not have been unduly crowded 

 in such a chamber. 



The heart of a whale is the size of a hogshead. The main blood 



