6G0 NATURAL HISTORY. 



hauled on board to be tried out. The whole process is very intricate, 

 and in it the whale is turned over and over until at last all the flesh is 

 gone, when the skeleton is left to the sharks which have gathered round. 

 The blubber, which may be nearly a foot in thickness, is placed in the ren- 

 dering-kettles and tried out, placed in barrels, which are headed up and 

 stored below. 



The history of the whale-fishery is an interesting one. It was first 

 prosecuted as a regular occupation by those brave fishermen of the Bay of 

 Biscay, who long before Columbus made their regular voyages to the 

 Banks of Newfoundland in search of cod. From them the business passed 

 to the Dutch, and thence to the inhabitants of the New World, where 

 Nantucket and New Bedford soon became pre-eminent. They cleared the 

 Atlantic of whales. They ventured into the Arctic seas and sailed around 

 the two great capes to the south into the Pacific in their search for oil, and 

 at one time seventy thousand people were directly or indirectly employed 

 in the United States in the pursuit of oil and bone. To-day the whole 

 business has changed, and its former glory has departed, a fact due prin- 

 cipally to three things: the decrease in the number of whales, the result 

 of over-fishing ; the discovery of the oil-fields of Pennsylvania and the 

 consequent introduction of petroleum for lighting and lubricating ; and 

 thirdly, the fear of privateers in the late war to whom a whale-ship was 

 a welcome prize. 



Sea-Cows. 



Columbus in one of his voyages saw a mermaid ; at least, so the story 

 goes. AY hat he really saw, of course, it is not possible to say with cer- 

 tainty, but the chances seem to favor its having been a most peculiar 

 animal, the manatee, or sea-cow, of the tropical Atlantic. If we get a 

 close view of the creature, the resemblance to what a mermaid should be 

 is exceedingly remote; but seen at a distance with but the head above the 

 water, and at a time when the imagination was all excited by the won- 

 ders of the New World, it is possible that this creature may have been 

 transmogrified into one of those animals of whose actual existence no one 

 at that time had the slightest doubt. 



The manatees are very whale-like in appearance, and cannot be removed 

 far from them in any systematic arrangement, and yet they have many 

 peculiarities which forbid their union with them. But two distinct genera 

 and less than half a do/en species are now living; about a century ago 

 there was one more. The fate of this is very interesting. Bering, the 

 Russian explorer who gave his name to an island in the Arctic seas and to 

 the strait separating America and Asia, visited Bering Island over a cen- 



