vii. THE MERMAID. 101 



than the manatee, but it must at length come to the 

 surface to breathe, for it cannot respire the air dissolved in 

 the water as the fishes do ; and when the hot pent-up 

 breath comes out into the cold air of the northern 

 latitudes it condenses into a cloud of fog-spray, which looks 

 from a distance like a jet or column of water. This is 

 called the spouting of whales. I have seen them spout- 

 ing in the North Atlantic, and it looks very much as 

 if they were spouting up water, but it is really only the 

 condensed breath together with some spray carried up 

 with it that one sees. In most animals in ourselves for 

 example the windpipe coming from the lungs opens 

 by a slit-like aperture into the top of the throat. But in 

 the whale it is prolonged into a tube which, passing up 

 from the floor to the roof of the great cavern-mouth, is 

 thrust into the passage leading straight up through the 

 front of the head to the spiracle. Whereas therefore in us 

 and in the great majority of air breathers the breath comes 

 up from the lungs into the back of the mouth cavity, and 

 then passes out from the mouth cavity to the nostrils 

 through the nasal passages above the palate, in the whale 

 the breath need not enter the mouth cavity at all, but is 

 carried up by the tube into the nasal passages at once, and 

 so to the spiracles. There is however no arrangement of 

 this sort in the manatee. 



In the paddle both of the whales and sirens all the parts 

 of our own upper limbs are represented the arm, the fore- 

 arm, the wrist and the hand. But in the whales the arm 

 and fore-arm are very much shortened, the fingers, or 

 some of them, are flattened and elongated, and are com- 

 pletely embedded in flesh and skin, so as to form a paddle. 

 The nails or claws which the fingers of a hand generally 

 bear have quite disappeared. The bones are moreover so 

 locked together that the paddle can only be moved from 



