THE WHALES. 27 



tooth, and would not give it up to the principal chief 

 of another island. 



A singular example of the passion for whale's teeth 

 is given in Mariner's account of the Tonga Islands. A 

 whale had been thrown on a small island, inhabited 

 only by a man and his wife, and the king came, accord- 

 ing to custom, to take the teeth. Finding only two, 

 he demanded the others from the man, who produced 

 two more from a basket, and declared that there were 

 no more. His wife, however, confessed that she had 

 secreted one, which she gave up. Nothing could 

 induce either of them to acknowledge that they knew 

 of any more teeth ; and first the man and then the 

 woman were killed with clubs. 



Some years afterwards the missing teeth were dis- 

 covered on the island, carefully buried, so that these 

 extraordinary people actually preferred to lose their 

 lives rather than their treasure. 



With these teeth the spermaceti whale seizes its 

 prey, which consists almost exclusively of cuttle-fish of 

 various species, mostly those which are called "squids;" 

 Mr. Bennett asserting that he has often seen large 

 limbs of the squid floating on the water, having evi- 

 dently been bitten off. He always used in such cases 

 to look out for spermaceti whales, and never failed to 

 find them. 



It seems rather strange that such creatures should 

 form the food of the whale. In the first place, the 

 suckers with which their arms are thickly set can cling 

 so tightly to any object, that it is a wonder how the 

 whale can manage to get them down its throat ; an din 

 the second place, they are so active that the narrow 



