THE LION AND HIS KIN 89 



males, or when threatened with danger from other causes, 

 as when attacked by man. The males are exceedingly 

 pugnacious, and fight with one another for the possession 

 of females with great ferocity, such contests being accom- 

 panied by cries which can be heard for miles. From the 

 difficulty which Esquimaux and sealers find in killing the 

 animal with clubs it certainly seems as if this strange 

 wind-bag were more than merely ornamental. 



That those extraordinary creatures the Cetacea — the 

 Whales and their kin — are derived from the same common 

 stock as the typical carnivora there can nowadays be 

 no doubt, widely as they have departed from their land- 

 dwelling relatives in almost every possible feature of their 

 organization. In the matter of their " Courtship " we 

 know nothing, but we may infer certain incidents in this 

 critical period of their life-history from the peculiar nature 

 of the secondary sexual characters which some species 

 display. Thus in the Pilot Whale {Globicephalus) and the 

 Bottle-nose Whale {Hyperoddon) the forehead, in the bulls, 

 is enormously swollen by a mass of fibrous tissue so dense 

 as to turn the blade of the sharpest knife, as I know well 

 from attempts to dissect this region. Now the only use, 

 surely, for such a cushion is that of a battering-ram 

 by rival males in charging one another, as rams and other 

 horned animals will do. In the Bottle-nose Whale this 

 cushion is backed up by an enormous mass of solid bone 

 thrown up by the maxillae. The origin of this bony 

 growth is interesting, for it appears first as a slight swelling 

 in the rare species Berardius ; it is seen at a further 

 stage of growth in the female " Bottle-nose " {Hyperoodon)^ 

 and attains its maximum in the male, where it stands 

 unique. There are two other species which demand 

 notice here. The first is Layard's Beaked Whale 



