DESCRIPTION OF THE WHALE. 145 



regions. John Parry relates that joints of meat hung by 

 his crew over the sides of the ship were in a few days picked 

 to the bone by shrimps. 



Some species of whales are entirely destitute of teeth, but 

 Nature has provided them with an apparatus of whalebone, 

 for the purpose of straining out of the water the small ani- 

 mals which form their nourishment. There are several hun- 

 dreds of these plates on each side of the mouth, the whole 

 quantity in that of a large whale sometimes weighing nearly 

 two tons. 



The tongue of the whale is a soft thick mass, not extend- 

 ing beyond the back of the mouth. It was formerly consid- 

 ered a great delicacy of the table, and a right of royalty. 

 The sword-fish, an implacable enemy of the whale, has a sim- 

 ilar relish for tlie tongue, and, it is said, leaves the rest of 

 the carcass untouched. The skin of the whalo is naked and 

 smooth, with the exception of a few bristles about the jaws, 

 and is covered with an oily fluid, which renders it very slip- 

 pery; beneath tliis is a thick layer, from eight to twenty 

 inches, of a fatty substance, called blvhber^ the most valuable 

 part of the animal, and which yields on boiling nearly its own 

 bulk of thick coarse glutinous oil. It is by this wrapper that 

 Providence enables the whale, a warm-blooded animal, to 

 defy the utmost extremity of cold, and to retain a sufficient 

 proportion of lieat even under the icy Polar seas. It also 

 serves to make the specific gravity of the body much lighter 

 than it otherwise would be, so as to resist the pressure of the 

 water at the great depths to which the whale descends. Yet 

 it is this warm covering, so essential to the animal itself, 

 that has excited the cupidity and deadly pursuit of man, 

 causing him to brave the most appalling dangers, trusting to 

 the resources of art in the instruments of destruction where 

 brute force alone could never prevail. 



To give an idea of the quantity and the value of the oil 

 obtained from a Greenland whale of sixty feet in length, it 



