ORDER OE CETACEA. 
81 
ordinary life of tlie animal, useful to it for its respiration, its nutri- 
tion, and, at the same time, an offensive and defensive weapon. 
Narwhals are not always brutal and warlike. Scoresby saw 
some very merry bands of these marine animals ; they raised their 
horns and crossed them, as if they were going to fence, and they 
followed the ship with a sort of wild curiosity. 
The ivory of the Narwhal’s tusk is an object of great value, for 
it is more compact, harder, and susceptible of a finer polish than 
that of the Elephant. It is on this account that visitors to the 
library of Versailles are shown a walking-stick made of narwhal 
ivory inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Of this ivory is made the 
throne of the kings of Denmark, which was to he seen, and which 
is, perhaps, to he seen still, in the Castle of Rosenberg. 
A most excellent observer, Mr. R. Brown, remarks that “ the 
Narwhal is gregarious, generally travelling in great herds. I 
have seen,” he relates, “a herd of many thousands travelling north 
in their summer migrations, tusk to tusk and tail to tail, like a 
regiment of cavalry, so regularly did they seem to rise and sink 
into the water in their undulatory movements in swimming. It 
is very active, and will often dive with the rapidity of the Right 
Whale, taking out thirty or forty fathoms of line. These ‘ schules ’ 
are not all of one sex, as stated by Scoresby, but consist of males 
and females mixed. The use of the tusk has long been a matter 
of dispute : it has been supposed to use it to stir up its food from 
the bottom ; but if such were the case the females would he sadly at 
a loss. They seem to fight with them ; for it is rarely that an 
unbroken one is obtained, and occasionally one may be found with 
the point of another jammed into the broken place, where the tusk 
is young enough to be hollow, or entirely lost close to the skull. 
Fabricius thought that this protuberance was to keep the holes open 
in the ice during the winter ; and the following occurrence seems 
to support his view. In April, 1860, a Greenlander was travel- 
ling along the ice in the vicinity of Christianshaab, and discovered 
one of those open places in the ice which, even in the most severe 
winters, remain free of ice. In this hole hundreds of Narwhals and 
Belugas were protruding their heads to breathe, no other open spot 
presenting itself for miles around. It was described to me as akin 
to an arctic Black Hole in Calcutta, from the crowding of the 
Narwhals in their eagerness to keep to the place. Hundreds of 
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