390 INDEX. 



breathes air at the surface of the water, and cannot remain 

 under it like other fishes : it blows loudly through the spout- 

 holes, and most fiercely when wounded : whalebone diffe- 

 rent from the bones of the body : the fins are from five to 

 eight feet long : the throat so narrow, nothing larger than a 

 herring can be swallowed : the tail, its only weapon of de- 

 fence, is twenty-four feet broad, and strikes hard blows : 

 one seen by Ray, marbled, with the figures 122 distinctly 

 marked upon it : the flesh palatable to some nations : the 

 female and male keep much together : their fidelity exceeds 

 that of birds: do not cross breeds: she goes with young 

 nine or ten months, is then fatter than at other times : pro- 

 duces two breasts and teats at pleasure : suckles her young 

 a year, and how: is very tender of them : defends them 

 fiercely when pursued : dives with them, and comes up soon 

 to give them breath : during the first year called short- 

 heads, and then yield fifty barrels of blubber: at two years 

 they are stunts, and after that skull-fish : the food of this 

 animal, an insect called medusa by Linnaeus, and walfischoas 

 by the Icelanders: pursues no other fish, and is inoffensive 

 in its element : the whale-louse, of the shell-fish kind, sticks 

 to its body, as to the foul bottom of a ship, gets under the 

 fins, and eats through the skin into the fat : the sword-fish 

 affrights the whale, avoids the stroke of its tail, bounds upon 

 its back, and cuts into it with the toothed edges of its bill : 

 the killer, a cetaceous fish of great strength, with powerful 

 teeth, besets the whale as dogs do a bull, tears it down, and 

 then devours only its tongue : old manner of taking whales : 

 improvements hinted, v. 31, &c. 



Whale (Spermaceti), the cachalot, has teeth in the under jaw : 

 is less than the whale, about sixty feet long, and sixteen 

 high : can remain longer under water, and the head makes 

 one-half of the whole : is voracious and destructive even to 

 dolphins and porpoises : seven distinctions in this tribe : con- 

 tain two precious drugs, the spermaceti and ambergris : the 

 latter mostly in older fishes, v. 52. See Cachalot. 



Wheat-ear, a thick short-billed bird of the sparrow kind, 

 thought foreign, iv. 256. It migrates before winter, 257. 



Whin-chat, a slender-billed bird of the sparrow kind, iv. 255. 

 Bird of passage, 257. 



Whip-snake, a very venomous serpent of the East, is five feet 

 long, and its bite kills in six hours' time, v. 369. 



Whirlpool, manner in which it is formed, 5. 228. Those of the 

 ocean particularly dangerous, 229. The central point al- 

 ways lowest, and why, 176. 



Whirlwind, the most rapid formed by united contributions of 

 minerals, vegetables, and animals, increasing the current of 

 air, i. 288. 



Whiskers, a man without them formerly considered as unfit for 



