MAMMIFEROUS ANIMALS. 418 



name of Sperma Ceti; and from its intestines, 

 an inodorous concrete, denominated, ambergris; 

 while the tish generally, like the common Whale, 

 furnishes the captors with a vast proportion of 

 oil of a superior quality, which, with the sperma 

 ceti and amlx'.rgris, in favourable seasons, most 

 amply rewards the expence and risk incurred in 

 enterprizes of this description.* 



Thus the animals contained in the order of 

 Cete, (but more especially the two genera, we 

 have just described,) are rendered doubly inter- 

 esting ; first in a philosophical point of view, by 

 the strong line of distinction which nature has 

 drawn between them and all other fishes ; as evin- 

 ced in the structure and functions of their inter- 

 nal organs, and in the mode by which they pro- 

 duce and give suck to their young, thus approx- 

 imating them to land Mammiferous animals; 

 while their external conformation, and the ele- 

 ment in which they live, would seem to bestow 

 on them the character of fishes. And secondly, 

 in a commercial one, by the application of var- 

 ious parts of their bodies to practical purposes ; 



* The animals belonging to the first and the last Genus, 

 namely, the Narwhal, and the Dolphin tribes, though 

 furnished with the same oily covering as the others, are too 

 small to be objects of commercial consideration, and therefore 

 are only accidentally destroyed ; excepting by the more un- 

 civilized inhabitants of Northerly Countries, by whom they are 

 occasionally used for domestic purposes. 



