112 
WHALE FISHERY. 
result of the difficulty of observing the ways of creatures living 
in a medium in which we cannot exist. Human agency has, 
nevertheless, both directly and incidentally, produced great 
changes in the population of the sea, the lakes, and the rivers, 
and if the effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are appar¬ 
ently of small importance in general geography, they are still 
not wholly inappreciable. The great diminution in the abun¬ 
dance of the larger fish employed for food or pursued for prod¬ 
ucts useful in the arts is familiar, and when we consider how the 
vegetable and animal life on which they feed must be affected 
by the reduction of their numbers, it is easy to see that their 
destruction may involve considerable modifications in many 
of the material arrangements of nature. The whale does not 
appear to have been an object of pursuit by the ancients, for 
any purpose, nor do we know when the whale fishery first 
commenced.* It was, however, very actively prosecuted in 
the Middle Ages, and the Biscayans seem to have been partic¬ 
ularly successful in this as indeed in other branches of nautical 
industry, f Five hundred years ago, whales abounded in every 
Egypt, on the other hand, the cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as 
numerous as ever, and are much dreaded by all the natives, except the 
professional snake charmers. 
* I use whale not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for all the 
large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name. 
t From the narrative of Ohther, introduced by King Alfred into his 
translation of Orosius, it is clear that the Northmen pursued the whale 
fishery in the ninth century, and it appears, both from the poem called 
The Whale, in the Codex Oxoniensis, and from the dialogue with the fish¬ 
erman in the Colloquies of Aelfric, that the Anglo-Saxons followed this 
dangerous chase at a period not much later. I am not aware of any evi¬ 
dence to show that any of the Latin nations engaged in this fishery until 
a century or two afterward, though it may not be easy to disprove their 
earlier participation in it. In mediaeval literature, Latin and Eomance, 
very frequent mention is made of a species of vessel called in Latin, hale - 
neria , balenerium , balenerius , balaneria , etc.; in Catalan, balener; in French, 
balenier ; all of which words occur in many other forms. The most obvious 
etymology of these words would suggest the meaning, whaler , baleinier; 
but some have supposed that the name was descriptive of the great size 
of the ships, and others have referred it to a different root. From the 
