OKDEE OF CETACEA. 
39 
To keep up life in the whole of the immense organization of 
the Whale, to give it strength for its continual motion, to keep up 
the breath which gives life to these extraordinary creatures, what 
quantity of aliment, what peculiar food is necessary P 
This food is composed of but very small creatures. Lacepede 
says the Whale feeds chiefly on mollusks and crabs. The number 
of these animals swallowed by the huge Cetacean compensates for 
their smallness of size. 
According to Dr. Thiercelin, in the whaling- grounds, in spring, 
and still more in summer, the sea is, in places, of a brown colour. 
This colour is due to small crustaceans, which are somewhat of the 
shape of Lobsters, but of which the greatest diameter does not 
exceed two millimetres. These crustaceans form banks of animal 
matter, which the whalers call boete , and which are ten, fifteen, or 
twenty leagues in length, by some leagues in breadth, and are 
three or four metres in thickness. Here is a banquet well served, 
if not for the size of the prey, at any rate, as far as the mass which 
constitutes it is concerned ! The Whale wanders up and down 
these rich banks, and browses, as we may say, in this immense and 
fertile pasturage. 
Dr. Thiercelin gives some details as to the manner in which 
the Whale seizes its food. 
It lowers its under jaw, spreads its tongue out well on the 
lower maxillary plate, and advances gently into the midst of 
this swarm of minute creatures, which it is about to swallow. 
The mouth, if such an enormous opening can be called a mouth, 
then presents an anterior aperture, in shape, that of an irregular 
triangle, the span of which is from six to seven metres. As the 
Whale advances, the water which it passes through, and which 
enters into its mouth, escapes laterally by the intervals which 
separate the whalebone plates, whilst the boete adheres to the 
hairs of the whalebone plates, and adheres to the palate. When it has 
thus passed over a space of from forty to fifty metres, it slackens its 
pace, raises its lower jaw, applies its lips to the whalebone plates, 
and distends its tongue in such a way that it occupies the whole 
of its mouth, now closed. The water escapes through the interstices 
of the whalebone plates ; the point of the tongue gathers together 
by a rotatory movement all the animalcula caught on the interior 
hairs, makes them up into an alimentary bolus, and conveys them 
