ON THE GREENLAND RIGHT-WHALE. 73 



number and position, but also to a certain degree as to form and size. As to form, as far as the 

 pulp of each of the blades, like the blades themselves, had, besides a fixed upper edge, an outer 

 smooth and an inner and depending filamentous edge, and moreover they v^^ere separated by 

 fissures from one another throughout their entire length into a chief lamina and a row of 

 subsidiary laminæ ; and as to size, as far as the length of these transversely placed parts vpas 

 not only quite the same, but the height of the pulps as well as that of the horny blades was 

 also greatest outwardly, gradually diminishing in an inward direction. Of course the pulps were 

 here, as everywhere else, much smaller than the blades, absolutely speaking, though not nearly in 

 the same proportion as in older individuals. In the chief-blade, four inches long, the pulp was 

 nine lines long or only four times shorter than its horny baleen, whereas no pulp higher than three 

 or four inches can find room in the hollow part of a ten or eleven feet long whalebone-blade of a 

 Greenland whale. Thus, while the pulps are growing from nine lines to four inches, or in other 

 words have increased to four times their original length, the horny blades grow from three inches 

 to eleven or twelve feet, or forty-eight times that length ; the pulp must accordingly, as compared 

 with the horny blade, be ten times longer in the newborn individual than in the full-grown animal. 



It must be mentioned, as something peculiar in the pulps of the newborn whale, that, in 

 many of those of the chief laminæ, fissures were found on the filamentous edge, that could only 

 be distinguished from those by which the baleen was divided into a chief-blade and several 

 subsidiary blades by their not penetrating entirely to the fixed base of the pulp-blade. Now, 

 as it can scarcely be doubted but that every pulp-blade, as happens with the pidps of all other 

 horny parts, has grown out gradually on the smooth surface of the skin, and especially that 

 the most prominent part of it is the one that has appeared first, it must necessarily be supposed 

 that every such imperfect fissure in a pulp-blade has, in an earlier period, divided it into two 

 pieces, from which we may infer that the pulp of the chief lamina of whalebone, and with 

 this also its horny baleen, grows in breadth by gradually uniting into itself the nearest sub- 

 sidiary lamina. This supposition is also corroborated by the fact that the younger the whale- 

 bone-blade is, the greater is the extent of its subsidiary blades in proportion to its chief-blade, thus 

 in the newborn whale this extent is half the length of the lamina measured from the exterior to 

 the interior encircling ligament ; in the half-grown one, on the other hand, only about one-third 

 (two inches of six). On the other hand, it might seem to be refuted by the remarkable fact that 

 the number of subsidiary blades according to our researches is by no means diminished by age. 

 In the foetus we could not count more than twenty subsidiary blades for each lamina ; and in the 

 half-grown individual the number was the same as far as we could judge. This observation, 

 however, will lose all its weight as an objection to our supposition, when we add another observa- 

 tion certainly not less authentic, namely, that the gradual appearance of the pulps of the subsidiary 

 blades is by no means concluded with uterine life but continues during the first years after birth, 

 for so long and in the same proportion as the larger subsidiary blades continue to unite with the 

 chief lamina. 



Presuming, as we do, that the most prominent pari of every blade of whalebone is the one 

 that has appeared earliest, we must suppose that the longest blades, those of the middle of the 

 series, appear first of all. It seems, however, as if all the blades of either set grow forth very 

 quickly one after another. For whereas not any laminæ of baleen seem to be found in the foetus 

 at the middle of uterine gestation, they seem already to be present in their full number, in the 

 full-grown fcetus. We say seem, for it is always difficult, not to say impossible, to state the exact 



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