THE OPEN SEA 81 
its mouth, while the whalebone plates act as 
a sieve and prevent the small animals from 
getting away. The stomach of a dead whale 
has been found to contain a mass of minute 
animals so thick that it could only be dug out 
with a spade. 
The whale has no settled place of abode in 
the ocean, and its swimming powers enable it 
to make enormous journeys. Some whales 
“travel twice a year more than a quarter of 
the circumference of the globe, being in sum- 
mer amid the Arctic snows, and in winter on 
the other side of the equator.” ‘They travel 
mainly in the wake of their food-supply, but 
as there is a great regularity in the occurrence 
of the smaller marine organisms, “their jour- 
neyings are in general as regular as if they 
were arranged according to the stars, and as if 
they took place along laid-out paths bounded 
on both sides.” 
On their journeyings the whales often form 
troops or “schools,” consisting chiefly of fe- 
males and young ones. The Greenland whale 
has usually only one young one at a time, 
which may be over three yards long at birth. 
The mother gives it suck for about a year, 
and is devotedly attached to it. 
