656 NATURAL HISTORY. 



detained. Its peculiar scent is due to its being composed of squid, and the 

 jaws of these animals are frequently found in it. Douglass, writing a hun- 

 dred years ago. says, " squid-fish, one of the Newfoundland baits for cod, 

 are sometimes in Newfoundland cast ashore in quantities, and as they cor- 

 rupt and fry in the sun, they become a jelly or substance of an amber- 

 grease smell ; therefore as squid bills are sometimes found in the lumps of 

 ambergrease, it may be inferred, that ambergrease is some of the excre- 

 ment from squid-food, with some singular circumstances or dispositions 

 that procure this quality, seldom occurring." Masses of ambergris weigh- 

 ing two hundred and twenty-five pounds have been obtained. 



The two-toothed whales, most of which are inhabitants of the Southern 

 Seas, and which have only two teeth in the lower jaw and none in the 

 upper, can only be mentioned by name. A relative of these is the bottle- 

 nosed whale of tin- northern Atlantic, in which it requires no little imagi- 

 nation to see the slightest resemblance to a bottle in the rounded head and 

 the protuberant jaws. The oil of this species is nearly equal in quality to 

 that of the sperm-whale. The bottle-nose is destitute of teeth. 



The whalebone whales which follow are utterly destitute of teeth in 

 the adult condition, and yet the presence of teeth in the young is conclu- 

 sive evidence that these animals have descended from toothed forms. In 

 place of teeth they have a most curious strainer composed of large horny 

 plates placed one after another on either side of the upper jaw, and fringed 

 out below into large numbers of rather stiff hairs. These plates furnish the 

 whalebone of commerce; they are not true bone, but are more of the nature 

 of hair agglutinated together. When a whalebone whale opens its mouth, 

 the i dates of whalebone or baleen drop down, so that they form a curtain 

 extern ling on either side from one jaw to the other, and then when the 

 mouth shuts again, the plates are carried up into a hollow in front of the 

 throat. All sorts of marine invertebrates form the food of these whales, 

 and the minute forms that throng the seas are known to the sailors as 

 ' hrit.' The whalebone whales swim open-mouthed through the water, their 

 jaws and the whalebone forming a fine net which retains the tiniest parti- 

 cles, and on these, insignificant as they would seem, the body, sometimes a 

 hundred feet in length, is nourished. AVere the sea as barren of these forms 

 as is fresh water, the whalebone whale would quickly starve ; but the sea 

 absolutely teems with microscopic life, and a few minutes' work with the 

 surface net of the naturalist will give one new ideas of the sufficiency of 

 these infinitesimal animals to support the largest forms of life. 



We need say hut little of the species of whalebone whales; indeed, 

 naturalists have scarcely gotten them straightened out. Still there are 



