234 WHALES. 



largest stranded on the British shores, was at Alloa, on 

 the Firth of Forth. It was forty-three feet long, and 

 twenty in circumference ; the jaws were fourteen feet 

 long ; there were about three hundred plates of baleen 

 on each side of the mouth, the longest of which were 

 about eighteen inches. 



Both these varieties are great depredators. They may 

 be seen with just the top of the dorsal fin, and that part 

 of the head in which the blow-holes are situated, above 

 water, driving along with vast rapidity, while fishes 

 even of very considerable dimensions, and which are 

 themselves given to plunder, are ever and anon leaping 

 out of the water, to avoid that current which would 

 carry them into the wide mouth of the finner^ en- 

 tangle them amid the fringes of the baleen, and ulti- 

 mately find them their graves in the maw of that 

 voracious animal. Their only means of escape is 

 gaining water so shallow, that their pursuer cannot 

 follow them ; and the huge ones that have been found 

 on the shores, have generally met their fate by fol- 

 lowing their prey too eagerly, and running aground 

 during the ebbing of the tide. These finned whales 

 are of comparatively little value for their oil ; but the 

 Greenlanders are remarkably fond of the flesh, which 

 they procure, not by harpooning, as they do with the 

 larger whales, but by shooting the fish with arrows. 



PR^EDENTAT^E. NARWALS. 



THESE, though much inferior in size to the former, 

 are a singular race of animals. Their native habita- 

 tions, like those of the whales, are in the Greenland 



