THE ROMANCE OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



which I sailed. The gpecies was no doubt the great 

 rorqual, since the whalebone whale is said never 

 to venture beyond the limits of the Arctic Seas. 

 This is the most enormous of all the animals 

 known to inhabit this globe, attaining a length of 

 a hundred feet and even more. The skeleton of 

 one which was stranded near Ostend in 1827, 

 which was subsequently exhibited in Paris and 

 London, measured ninety-five feet. Two speci- 

 mens have been measured of the length of a hun- 

 dred and five feet, and Sir Arthur de Capel Brooke 

 asserts that it is occasionally seen of the enor- 

 mous dimensions of one hundred and twenty 

 feet.* 



The "right" or whalebone whale, the object of 

 commercial enterprise in the Polar Seas, is little 

 more than half as large as this last-named bulk. 

 Eighty and a hundred feet are mentioned, indeed, 

 by the earlier writers, as occasional dimensions 

 of this species, but these statements are possibly 

 exaggerations, or else the distinction between this 

 and the rorqual may have been overlooked. A 

 tradition exists of one Ochter, a Norwegian, of 

 King Alfred's day, who "was one of six that had 

 killed sixty whales in two days, of which some 

 were forty-eight, some fifty yards long." The dis- 

 crimination here would seem to imply actual 

 measurement, though perhaps it was not very 

 precise. At present, nothing like such a length is 

 attained. The late Dr. Scoresby, who was per- 

 sonally engaged in the capture of three hundred 

 and twenty-two whales, never found one of this 



* The gigantic whales that inhabit the Indian Ocean are 

 probably of this genus. One was stranded on the Chittagong 

 coast in August, 1842, which measured ninety feet in length and 

 forty-two in diameter ; and another on the coast of Aracan in 

 1851, which was eighty-four feet long. (See Zoologist for De- 

 cember, 1859, p. 6778.) 



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