OF THE SPERM WHALE. 
101 
Although this tribe cannot be said to ruminate, yet in 
the number of stomachs they come nearest to that order, 
but here I suspect the order of digestion is in some 
degree inverted. In both the ruminants and this tribe, 
I think it must be allowed that the first stomach must 
be a reservoir. In the ruminants, the precise use of 
the second and third stomachs is perhaps not known, 
but digestion is certainly carried on in the fourth, while, 
in this tribe, I imagine that digestion is performed in 
the second, and the use of the third and fourth is not 
exactly known. The ccecum and colon do not assist in 
pointing out the nature of the food and mode of digestion 
in this tribe. 
The porpoise, which has teeth, and four cavities in the 
stomach, has no coecum similar to some land animals, 
as the bear, badger, racoon, ferret, polecat, etc. ; neither 
has the bottle-nose a coecum, which has only two small 
teeth in the lower jaw ; and the piked whale, which has 
no teeth, has a coecum almost exactly like the lion, 
v/hich has teeth and a very different kind of stomach. 
In the stomach of the large bottle-nose I found the 
beaks of some hundreds of cuttle-fish ; in the grampus 
I found the tail of a porpoise ; in the stomach of the 
piked whale I found the bones of different fish, but par- 
ticularly those of the dog-fish. From the size of the 
oesophagus we may conclude that they do not swallow 
fish so large in proportion to their size as many fish do 
that we have reason to believe take their food in the 
same way, for fish often attempt to swallow what is 
larger than their stomachs can at one time contain, and 
