WEYMOUTH 



GJOO 



WHALEBONE 



peared. He then devoted himself to literature 

 and produced A Gentleman of France, widely 

 read in Europe and America. Under the Red 

 Robe, My Lady Rotha, The Man in Black, 

 The Castle Inn, Sophia, In King's Byways and 

 other works of less note. The popularity of his 

 romances depends chiefly upon interesting plots 

 and a light, graceful manner of narration. 



WEYMOUTH, wa'miUh, MASS., a town in 

 Norfolk County, twelve miles southeast of 

 Boston, industrially important as a center of 

 shoe manufacture. It is on the New York, 

 New Haven & Hartford Railroad, and on inter- 

 urban lines. The town, which is made up of 

 several villages, has three parks and Fo and 

 Tufts libraries. Weymouth was settled by 

 Capt. Robert Gorges in 1623, and was called 

 Wessagusset until 1635, when it was incorpo- 

 rated under its present name. The population, 

 which was 12,859 in 1910, was 13,882 in 1916 

 (Federal estimate).' C.P.M. 



WHALE, the largest animal known. Though 

 it lives in the sea it is not a fish, but is a 

 warm-blooded mammal, and in spite of its con- 

 stant life in the water it retains many charac- 

 teristics of land animals. Within its two pad- 



SKELETON O^ A WHALE 

 The dotted lines indicate the general contour of 

 the animal. 



dies are all the bones and joints and most of 

 the muscles, arteries and nerves of a human 

 arm, and deep in its body are the rudiments of 

 hind legs. Unlike the fish, it cannot breathe 

 under water, though able to stay beneath the 

 surface perhaps an hour. Its tail is horizontal, 

 which fact enables it to rise speedily from great 

 depths; when it reaches the surface it expels 

 the air from its lungs through a nostril on top 

 of its head with such force that the moisture of 

 its warm breath, condensing in the cold air, 

 rises in a column high in the air. The cry of 

 the lookout "There she blows" is familiar 

 to all who have read stories of whaling days. 

 Whales are from three feet to eighty-five feet 

 long. In most of them the head is more than a 

 third of the length of the entire animal. 



Whale Oil and Whalebone. The whale first 

 known to commerce, called the right whale, is 

 hunted for two products, oil and whalebone. 

 Beneath its skin is a thick layer of fat, called 



blubber, which keeps it warm and helps it to 

 resist the pressure of the water at great depths. 

 Whalers cut the blubber in one continuous 

 spiral strip like an apple paring, and reduce it 

 to oil on board ship. Until kerosene came into 

 use whale oil was burned in lamps all over th< 

 world. 



A more valuable product is whalebone. This 

 is really not bone, but plates of hair which 

 hang from the roof of the mouth, developed 

 from ridges like those in the human mouth. 

 The right whale has no teeth. In feeding it 

 travels at full speed with open jaws, and the 

 millions of minute creatures in the water are 

 strained out by the whalebones, numbering over 

 500, and some of them ten or twelve feet long. 

 From each whale is taken a ton or more, worth 

 about $12,000. In preparation for use whale- 

 bone is boiled and cut while soft. It is used 

 principally in mechanical brushes for which 

 ordinary bristles are too soft. Before flexible 

 steel came into use whalebone was employed in 

 making umbrella ribs and corset stays. 



Sperm Whale and Sperm Oil. The sperm 

 whale has teeth, and it eats cuttlefish. It has 

 no whalebone, but its blubber furnishes sperm 

 oil, superior to ordinary whale oil, and it yields 

 two other valuable products, spermaceti and 

 ambergris. The first is a wax used in candles 

 and cosmetics, which is found dissolved in the 

 oil in an enormous cavity in the head. The 

 second, taken from the intestines, is extremely 

 valuable to perfume makers. 



Whaling. We know from the accounts of Al- 

 fred the Great that whales were hunted a 

 thousand years ago. In recent centuries, until 

 whales had been killed in such numbers that 

 they became scarce, hundreds of ships, most 

 of them from America, engaged in whaling. 

 New Bedford, Mass., was for many years the 

 world's center for the whaling industry. Burke. 

 in his famous speech On Conciliation with 

 America, praises the exploits of Yankee whal- 

 ers. In modern whaling operations swift .ships 

 are used, and the whales are killed by har- 

 poons shot from guns. The carcasses are then 

 towed to stations along the shore. C.H.H. 



Consult Beddard's A Book on Whales; Verrlll's 

 The Real Story of the Whaler. 



Related Subjects. Interesting correlative in- 

 formation will be found in the following articles 

 in these volumes : 

 Ambergris Harpoon 



Blubber Mammals 



Cetacea Spermaceti 



WHALEBONE. See WHALE. 



