196 WHALES AND WHALE FISHERIES xiv 



minute but highly nutritious crustaceans and pteropods which 

 swarm in immense shoals in the seas it frequents. The large 

 mouth enables it to take in at one time a sufficient quantity 

 of water filled with these small organisms, and the length and 

 delicate structure of the baleen provide a sufficient strainer or 

 hair -sieve by which the water can be drained off. If the 

 baleen were rigid, and only as long as is the aperture between 

 the upper and lower jaws when the mouth is shut, a space 

 would be left beneath it when the jaws are separated, through 

 which the water and the minute particles of food would escape 

 together. But instead of this, the long, slender, brush-like, 

 elastic ends of the whalebone blades fold back when the 

 mouth is closed, the front ones passing below the hinder ones 

 in a channel lying between the tongue and the lower jaw. 

 When the mouth is opened their elasticity causes them to 

 straighten out like a bow unbent, so that at whatever distance 

 the jaws are separated the strainer remains in perfect action, 

 filling the whole of the interval. The mechanical perfection 

 of the arrangement is completed by the great development of 

 the lower lip, which rises stiffly above the jawbone, and 

 prevents the long, slender, flexible ends of the baleen from 

 being carried outwards by the rush of water from the mouth, 

 when its cavity is being diminished by the closure of the 

 jaws and raising of the tongue. 



If, as appears highly probable, the " bowhead " or right 

 whale of the Okhotsk Sea and Behring Strait belongs to this 

 species, its range is circumpolar, but it is strictly limited to 

 the icy seas of the north. " Though," as Scammon says, " it 

 is true that these animals are pursued in the open water 

 during the summer months, in no instance have we learned of 

 their being captured south of where winter ice-fields are 

 occasionally met with." In the Behring Sea it is seldom seen 

 south of the 55th parallel, and the southern limit of its range 

 in the North Sea has been ascertained by Eschricht and 

 Eeinhardt to be from the east coast of Greenland at 64 N. lat. 

 along the north of Iceland towards Spitzbergen. Though 

 found in the seas on both sides of Greenland, and passing 

 freely from one to the other, it is never seen so far south as 

 Cape Farewell; but on the Labrador coast, where a cold 



