Among the Sharks and Whales' 425 



That this cumbrous rotundity may attack a 

 wounded whale is Hkely enough. It is one of the few 

 mistakes that Shakespeare makes, when he supposes 

 that fat people cannot be as maHgnantly mischievous, 

 and as dyspeptically sour-hearted, as Cassius himself ; 

 and we all know that even among ourselves a man's, 

 or for that matter a woman's, friends are ready enough 

 to give a snap at him or her when in trouble, which 

 they would never have risked in more prosperous days. 

 But that, with the mouth as usually depicted, the 

 grampus has the slightest chance of getting a mouth- 

 ful of blubber out of the side of an active unwounded 

 whale, I shall believe when I see him do it. 



The whole of the story is, as my Yankee friends 

 would say, ' considerable mixed.' One begins, after 

 much contradictory reading, to ask oneself, what is 

 a grampus ? In Cuvier's time he was entered in the 

 natural history books under the name of Delpliinus 

 orca or gladiator, a fiendish creature who did not 

 thresh the whales, but bullied them till they opened 

 their mouths (to do what, I wonder ; to bite them, or 

 appeal to the Speaker ?) — and then bit out their 

 tongues, as if they had been saying nasty things of 

 him. It could hardly have been for the mere food's 

 sake, for if stories be true, your orca has an appetite 

 not to be appeased with whales' tongues. 



A recent author tells us that out of the stomach 

 of one grampus he took thirteen porpoises and four- 

 teen seals, and might have had another, had not this 

 orca of infinite capacity choked himself in the 



