186 WHALES AND WHALE FISHERIES xiv 



what sense do you^use the term " fish " ? It happened to me 

 a few years ago to receive a semi-official inquiry from the 

 Colonial Office, as to whether a lobster was a fish, because 

 an important point in the dispute between the French and 

 English about the Newfoundland fisheries depended upon the 

 interpretation of an old treaty in which the word " fish " 

 occurs. After giving the modern naturalists' definition of a 

 fish, by which a lobster is clearly excluded from the class, of 

 course I felt it necessary to remind my correspondents that in 

 such a case the real answer to the question lay in the sense in 

 which the word was used at the time of the treaty, and by 

 those who were parties to drawing it up, and if that could be 

 ascertained it would be more to the point than the strictest of 

 scientific definitions. Now, on turning to what was, in the 

 beginning of the present century, our greatest authority on 

 the meaning of words, I find in Johnson's Dictionary (I now 

 quote from Todd's edition, 1818) "fish " defined as " an animal 

 that inhabits the water." Without doubt this was the general 

 and popular view, as the universally used expressions shell-fish, 

 lobster and oyster fisheries, whale fisheries, and even seal 

 fisheries, abundantly testify. I therefore cannot say that in 

 a certain vague and antiquated sense of the word, " fish " may 

 not be applied to the animals of which I propose to speak 

 to you this evening. This must not, however, cause us to 

 forget that, tested by the light of modern scientific knowledge, 

 a whale is in everything essential in its structure entirely 

 removed from the class of animals to which zoologists now 

 restrict the term " fish," a very clearly defined group of cold- 

 blooded creatures, breathing by means of gills the air which 

 is dissolved in the water in which they swim, with lowly 

 organised brain, and producing their young from eggs, and 

 after they are born not nourishing them by the mother's milk 

 in all of which, and many other important characters, 

 whales are entirely removed from them. In fact, as Professor 

 Huxley continues, in response to the question with which I 

 stopped the quotation : 



The answer, of course is, that the moment one compares a whale with 

 any one of the thousands of ordinary fishes, the two are seen to differ in 

 almost every particular of structure and, moreover, in all those points 



