The Zoologist — Apkil, 1873. 3463 



Captain Pease has several times seen the killer attack right and 

 humpback whales; they strike for the tongue if possible. They 

 often jump many feet from the water and fall upon him. Many 

 individuals, fifty or more, join in this attack. They tear out large 

 pieces from the blubber, food being evidently the object of'their 

 attack. Their great activity makes the whale helpless against them, 

 though he will struggle furiously before overborne. They some- 

 times drag down the whale after it has been killed by the whale- 

 men. 



The Captain was quite sure that the chief article of food of the 

 sperm whale is squid, as they vomit large quantities of them in 

 their death agonies ; he thinks that the whales take them by 

 swimming with the mouth so wide open that the lower jaw stands 

 at nearly right angles to the upper. Squid, he thinks, will grasp 

 at the jaw as the whale passes among them, and are cut in frag- 

 ments by the sudden closure of the jaws. He says that the jaw 

 is closed with prodigious force and suddenness, so that when out 

 of water the noise can be heard for two or three miles, and is 

 even noticeable under water. He stoutly maintains that he has 

 seen fragments of squid, where the whales had cut them in two, 

 exposing the cavity of the body, which was as large over as the 

 head of a forty gallon cask. In one case he saw the head of a 

 squid which he believes to have been as large as a sugar hogshead. 



The Captain is convinced that the right whale has a trace of 

 hair within the skin. He says that when the skin is fresh, if it be 

 scraped with a knife so as to remove the superficial parts, there 

 will then be seen a trace of hair in the inner section. This point 

 is worthy of attention from those naturalists who have opportuni- 

 ties for such work. It is evident that if the whale is the descend- 

 ant of some land mammal form it would be likely to preserve a 

 trace of the hairy covering. In this connection it is interesting 

 to note that, in the museum at Nantucket, there is a tooth of a 

 sperm whale with two fangs after the fashion of an ordinary 

 mammalian canine. The specimen was taken many years ago, 

 but with it is the statement that the other teeth of the whale 

 were of the same fashion. This clearly looks like a reversion of 

 some higher mammalian form of dentition. 



Captain Pease thinks that right whales attain very nearly their 

 adult size in three years, there being about three distinct sizes 

 found at one time in the sea. He thinks, however, that they may 



