PHYSETER MACROCEPHALUS. 



the size of the whalebone or baleen-plates, which are always 

 much greater in the genus Balcena than in Balcenoptera, and 

 it is this structure combined with the greater amount of blub- 

 ber in the true whale, which renders it an object of so much 

 more value to the whale-catchers, while its less courageous 

 habits, and .less violent efforts to escape when wounded, make 

 it a more sure and safe prey than the Small Whalebone whale. 



The plates of whalebone are the substitutes for teeth in 

 the mouth ; they have a similar mode of development from a 

 pulp and external membrane, and differ only in form, and in a 

 less proportion of earthy matter in their composition. They are 

 arranged vertically and transversely, in two series, consisting 

 each of three hundred plates, descending from the palatal 

 surface of the upper jaw, and terminating in a fringe of coarse 

 hairs on their oblique and inner margins, which is in contact 

 with the upper surface of the bulky tongue when the mouth is 

 closed. The mechanism of the seine is thus realized on an 

 enormous scale, and while the water gulped at each successive 

 mouthful is drained off through the interstices of the baleen- 

 plates, the molluscous and crustaceous animals are retained, 

 bruised into a pulp between the muscular tongue and coarse 

 fibres of the whalebone, and swallowed. The area of the gul- 

 let corresponds with the minute character of the food, and is 

 relatively smaller in the whale than in any other animal. The 

 stomach is divided into four cavities ; the intestinal canal is 

 long and narrow, and provided with a short and simple ca3cum. 



The whale has usually but one young at a birth, and brings 

 forth in the early spring. The period of gestation is unknown, 

 that of suckling lasts a year. In this stage of their growth, 

 the young are called short-heads by the whale-fishers ; at two 

 years old, and until able to find their appropriate food in due 

 abundance, they are termed stunts ; when they begin to get fat, 

 and until they attain their full size, they are called skull-fish. 



The interesting details of the profitable but perilous occu- 

 pation of whale-fishing will be found most amply and correctly 

 given in Scoresby's Account of the Arctic Regions. The baleen 

 and blubber are the only parts of the animal of any commer- 

 cial value, and the quantity of both yielded by these enormous 

 animals is of course considerable. The length of the largest 

 whalebone plates in a whale of sixty feet is as much as twelve 

 feet, and the blubber of such a one will yield more than 

 twenty tuns of pure oil, the proportion of oil to the blubber 



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