CHAPTER XII 



WHALES, SEALS, AND SEA-SERPENTS 



BY D'ARCY WENTWORTH THOMPSON 



I. Whales. 



THERE is a deal of interest in whales. The seafarer 

 rejoices to meet them in the monotony of his ocean 

 voyage ; the fisherman welcomes them in the narrow 

 waters as harbingers of the herring-shoals ; the mer- 

 chant sees in them the object of a rich and still widening 

 commerce ; the naturalist considers their manifold 

 variety in form and habit, the marvellous adaptation 

 of their bodies within and without to their strange 

 existence, their orderly migrations, and the unsolved 

 problems of their remote ancestral origin. 



Whales and dolphins of all kinds form, in our modern 

 classification, the group Cetacea ; for so we have learnt 

 to use an ancient word which the Greek mariners used 

 of all manner of great sea-monsters, shark or tunny 

 or whale. And the Cetacea form, for us, one order 

 of the mammals that is to say, of those warm- 

 blooded vertebrate animals that suckle their young 

 at the breast. Behind these simple facts we hide a 

 deal of ignorance ; for as to what the mammalia are, 

 how their several orders are related to one another 

 and in what way or ways they have been evolved 

 from Reptiles or other lower vertebrates, of all these 

 tl lings we have neither definite knowledge nor plausible 



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