CHAPTER I. 



ON THE CATODON AUSTRALIS. 



Whatever friendship or familiarity whales and dolphins may, 

 according to ancient writers, have had with men in the olden 

 time, it is very certain that the human species, with the exception 

 of a few sailors, have very little acquaintance with their " fat 

 friends" in these days. Even whalers in general know little 

 more of them than their oil. AVhile a lion or a tiger has become 

 quite a vulgar animal in our menageries, there are few persons 

 who have seen a live cetacean in captivity, excejit Gesner, or 

 rather Bondelet (whom Gesner, in the passage alluded to, seems 

 to be quoting), who states, that in his day, his countrymen were 

 in the habbit of carrying live dolphins as far into the interior as 

 Lyons ! It may, indeed, happen that the veracity of old Conrad's 

 book, is as little to be trusted to in this story,* as in its pictorial 

 representations of the whale tribe. At least, in the present 

 railroad times, when a live hippopotamus is sporting in the midst 

 of London, the most of the external aspect of a cetacean that any 

 Cockney has yet seen, has been presented to his wondering gaze 

 by some distorted skin. And this is one of the reasons why the 

 figures of the sperm whale given by Beale and Frederic Cuvier 

 are so widely different from each other as to make it almost 

 incredible that they should have been intended for the same 

 species. By such misshapen masses of stuffing so little accurate 

 information is afforded to the zoologist that he is of necessity 

 obliged to have recourse to the skeleton. 



* Hist. Anim., 1558, lib. iv. p. 387. 



