SPERM WHALE OR CACHALOT 397 



attains a length of over 60 feet, or, according to some 

 statements, as much as 80 feet. The gigantic head 

 and straight blunt forehead gives this whale a charac- 

 teristic appearance, the head being swollen out by a 

 huge mass of the peculiar fatty substance known as 

 " spermaceti/' The teeth are large, and limited to 

 the lower jaw. The blow-hole stands a little to one 

 side at the very front of the head. This whale is 

 absolutely cosmopolitan, its chief haunts being in the 

 warmer seas. The jaw is so overhung by the great 

 head that, like a shark, it has to turn over on its 

 back to bite. Its food, like several of the other 

 toothed whales, consists mainly of cuttle-fishes, and 

 several gigantic species of the latter are only known 

 from their half-digested remains found within the 

 stomach of the whale. The Prince of Monaco has 

 taken great interest in this curious method of studying 

 these rare oceanic cuttle-fish. The Sperm Whale on 

 its wanderings comes now and then to our own coasts. 

 It is seldom caught at Shetland, but the Hebridean 

 whaling-station got no less than seven individuals in 

 1909 ; and it is a very curious circumstance that all 

 the sperm whales captured on our Scottish whaling- 

 stations are found to be males, and males of moderate 

 size. The old bulls fight for possession of the cows 

 on the breeding-grounds in southern latitudes, and the 

 young males, defeated and driven from their haunts, 

 wander over the ocean. They get into the great 

 warm ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, and 

 so, in no inconsiderable numbers, reach our coasts 

 and perish there. Towards the end of the eighteenth 

 century London sent out a considerable fleet to the 

 sperm-whale fishing, numbering at one time as many 

 as seventy-five vessels, and it was British whalers who 

 opened up the remote whaling-grounds of the Pacific 



