OCEAN FISH AND OCEAN FISHING 39 



ful arrangement of fringed plates, called baleen, 

 depending from the palate, numbering quite three 

 hundred, and sometimes weighing two tons. They 

 fill up the sides of the whale's mouth completely, 

 and act as a sieve or strainer through which the 

 water passes and runs out again, leaving behind, 

 entangled in the sieve, innumerable crustacea — the 

 size of house-flies — that prey upon the minutest 

 of animalculae, swarming in Arctic seas to such 

 an extent as to colour them for miles and miles. 

 These crustacea, that constitute the "right" whale's 

 food, deposited on its huge tongue (20 feet by 

 9 feet), are swallowed down a throat smaller than 

 a man's hand. 



It had always been a puzzling question how this 

 baleen, so much longer than the space it occupies 

 in the whale's mouth — the blades being placed at 

 right angles to the long axis of the jaw — was 

 packed away when not in use ; but a discovery 

 made by Captain Gray, of the whaler Eclipse, 

 enabled Frank Buckland to explain it. 



" When the whale,'' he says, " closes its lower 

 jaw he first gently pushes backwards and upwards 

 towards the palate the anterior ^ plates of the 

 baleen ; the posterior plates go back under pressure 

 in succession, till all the plates of baleen lie back in 

 the mouth packed beautifully in regular order one 



