74 THE WHALE AND 



Arterial Circulation. Wise Provision of the Creator. 



its passage through that pipe must be inferior 

 in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing 

 from the whale's great heart, when his pulse 

 beats high in the conflict with his captors. 



In Dr. Hunter's account to the Philosophical 

 Society of the dissection of a small whale cast 

 upon the coast of Yorkshire, this aorta meas- 

 ured a foot in diameter. In that case, fifteen 

 or twenty gallons of living blood are ordinarily 

 thrown out of the heart of a large whale at a 

 stroke, with an immense velocity, through the 

 great bore of a blood-vessel, or rather blood 

 aqueduct, a foot or two in diameter. 



How it is, then, that, with such a prodigious 

 current of blood constantly flowing and needing, 

 oxygenization by the air, the whale can remain 

 under water so long, respiration suspended 

 (sometimes, in the case of a sperm whale, an 

 hour and a half), it was difficult to conceive, un- 

 til dissection discovered that in the cetaceous 

 animals, the arterial blood, instead of passing 

 into the venous circulation, the ordinary way, 

 has interposed, by the Creator's providence, a 

 structure which is nothing less than a grand 

 reservoir for the reception of a great quantity 

 of arterial blood, which, as occasion requires, is 



