6 
HISTORY OF THE WHALF 
was found to be fifty-eight feet in length. Enormous 
as his bulk is, rumor and the love of the marvellous 
have represented it as being at one time much great- 
er and the existing race as only the degenerate rem- 
nant of mightier ancestors. A length of sixty feet 
would imply a weight of seventy tons, or 150,000 
pounds, nearly the weight of two hundred fat oxen. 
Of this vast mass, the oil in a right whale composes 
about thirty tons; and when, as was the case some 
years ago, that article brought from $200 to $250 per 
ton, we may form some idea of the great value of the 
capture ; the bones of the head, fins, and tail weigh 
eight or ten ; the carcass, thirty or thirty-two tons. 
The largest quantity of oil obtained from the right 
whale, is about 200 barrels. Before the revolutionary 
war, a sloop from New Bedford captured one in the 
Straits of Belle Isle, which yielded 212 barrels of oil. 
Two fish loaded the sloop with 400 barrels of oil, and 
400 pounds of bone. These, however, were of ex- 
traordinary size. 
The food of this kind of fish is composed chiefly 
of small shrimps and animalcule. We should hardly 
expect to find, in those cold and dreary regions, 
much subsistence for the animal creation. But, 
instead of ceasing, life seems here to spring forth 
in boundless profusion ; the whole Northern ocean 
teems with minute and almost invisible particles of 
life. When examined by the microscope, they prove 
to be of the class vermes , of the genus medusa. They 
are soft and elastic, and are supposed to tinge the 
water of an olive-green color for several hundred 
