Fig. 84.

Skeleton of a Whalebone Whale (Mysticete), and Section of the Mouth with Whalebone.

b, blowhole; a, upper arm; fa, fore arm; h, hand; p, th, l, small remains of pelvis or hip-bone, thigh, and leg; r, roof of the palate; w, w, plates of whalebone; f, whalebone fringe.

We see then that the whale undoubtedly belongs to the same type as the four-footed land animals, although it branched off into the water so long ago that it

Footnote 186. Cetacea—cete, a whale.

may have come from some very early milk-giver. But why then has it become so like a fish? For the same reason that the penguin’s wings have become so fin-like, and the seal’s arms and legs have become flippers, namely, that during the long time in which the whales have taken to a watery life, those which could swim best and float best in the water have been the most successful in the struggle for existence; and as a fish’s shape is by far the best for this

purpose the warm-blooded milk-giver has gradually imitated it, though belonging to quite a different order of animals.

Fig. 85.

The Humpback Whale[187] suckling her young (after Scammon).

We saw this imitation already beginning in the seals, with their bodies sloping off towards the tail and their legs fastened back in a line with the body; but they have not gone so far in this direction as the whales have, since they still have hind legs and furry bodies. The sea cows, on their line, have gone a little farther, for they have lost their hind legs, and their skin is smooth, with very few hairs upon it. But it remained for the whales to take up the best fish-form, the old spindle-shape, thinning before and behind, with the strong fleshy tail ending in two tail lobes, which act like a screw in driving the body along.

Footnote 187. Megaptera.

Any good drawing of a whale shows at once how admirably these animals are fitted for gliding through the water (see Fig. 85). True, many of them have enormous heads, but these always have long face-bones ending in a rounded point, and even the huge head of the sperm whale (see Fig. 87), eighteen feet long, six feet high, and six feet wide, is rounded off above, and gradually thins away below, like the cutwater of a ship. The eyes are very tiny and so little exposed, that it is difficult to find them; there are no outer ears, though the bones within are large and probably very useful for hearing in water; the bones of the neck are seven, as is the rule among milk-givers, but they are so flattened and firmly soldered together, and so covered with blubber, that there is not even a hollow between the head and the body; while to crown all, the skin is perfectly smooth so as to offer no resistance to the water. Here, however, would be a disadvantage in the loss of the furry covering, since most of the whales travel into cold seas, were it not compensated by the great mass of oily fat or blubber which fills the cells in the under part of the skin, and keeps the whole body warm; and thus the whale, by a covering of fat often as much as a foot and a half thick, solves the problem of a warm-blooded animal, with a smooth gliding body, living in icy water without having its blood chilled.

In every essential for swimming, then, whales are as well provided as any fish, while their immensely strong backbone, and the long cords or tendons running from the mass of muscle on the body to the tail, give them such tremendous power that a large whale makes nothing of tossing a whole boat’s crew into the air and breaking the boat in two. But, though they are so far true water-animals, yet they cannot live entirely below as fish can, for they have no apparatus for water-breathing. The outside of their body takes on the appearance of a fish, but inside they have the true lungs, the four-chambered heart, and all the complicated machinery of a warm-blooded animal. Therefore, though a whale may dive deep and remain below to seek its food, yet before an hour has passed even the largest of them must come floating up to the top again, to blow out the bad air through the nostrils at the top of the head, and fill the capacious lungs with a fresh supply. It is then that, partly because of the water which has run into the blowhole, and partly because the rush of breath throws up spray from the sea, we see those magnificent spouts of water which tell that a whale is below. The older naturalists thought that these spouts were caused by the water which the whale had taken into its mouth; but this is not so, and Scoresby, the great Arctic traveller, states distinctly that if the blowhole of the whale is out of the water only moist vapour rises with the breath, while when it makes a large spout this comes from its blowing under water and so throwing up a jet.

If, however, the whale is a simple air-breather and yet swims under water with its mouth open, how comes it that this water does not run down the windpipe and choke the lungs? This is prevented by a most ingenious contrivance. At the top of our own windpipe there is a small elastic lid which shuts when we swallow, and prevents water and food from running down to the lungs. Now, in the whale the gristle answering to this lid runs up as a long tube past the roof of the mouth into the lower portion of the nose, and is kept there tightly, being surrounded by the muscles of the soft palate. The upper portion of the nose cavity then opens on the forehead by means of one or two “blowholes,” as the outside nose holes are called; so that when the blowholes are closed the whale can swim with its mouth open and feed under water, and yet not a drop will enter its lungs.

A large sperm whale will often remain twelve minutes or more at the top of the water, taking in air at the single blowhole in the front of its head, and purifying its blood, and then with a roll and a tumble it will plunge down again, and remain for an hour below, trusting to a large network of blood-vessels lying between the lungs and the ribs to supply purified blood to its body and retain the impure blood till it comes up again to breathe.

But the smaller whales and porpoises, which play about our coasts, have to come up much more often, and even when they are not tumbling and jumping, as they love to do, you may see them rising at regular intervals as they swim along, their black backs appearing like little hillocks in the water, as they “blow” strongly from their single nose-slit, take a quick breath in, and sink again to rise a few paces farther on and repeat the process.

Thus provided both with swimming and breathing apparatus, these purely air-breathing animals wander over the wide ocean and live the lives of fish, making such good use of food which cannot be reached by land animals, or those which must keep near the shore, that we shall not be surprised to find that the whale family is a very large one.

But it is curious that the fierce animals of prey among them should be, not the huge whales but the smaller Dolphins, Porpoises, and Grampuses; and this shows how different water-feeding is to land-feeding, since, because the water is full of myriads of small and soft creatures, the sperm whale feeding on jelly-fish, and the large whalebone whale feeding on soft cuttle-fish and the minutest beings in the sea, are those which attain the largest size.

Most people have at one time or another seen a shoal of porpoises either out at sea or travelling up the mouth of some large river, where

“Upon the swelling waves the dolphins show

Their bending backs, then swiftly darting go,

And in a thousand wreaths their bodies throw;”

and though they are small creatures, only about five feet long, they are very good examples of the whale shape, with their tapering bodies, broad tails, and the back fin, which is found in some whales and not in others. Sometimes they swim quietly, only rising to breathe, and then they work the tail gently from side to side; at others they gambol and frolic, and jump right out of the water, beating the tail up and down, and bending like a salmon when he leaps; and whether they come quietly or wildly, you may generally know they are near by the frightened mackerel and herrings, which spring out of the water to avoid them. For the porpoises have a row of sharp teeth in each jaw, more than a hundred in all, and they bite, kill, and swallow in one gulp, without waiting to divide their food, so that they make sad havoc among the fish.

Fig. 86.

The Porpoise.[188]

They are here to-day and gone to-morrow. A few kinds wander up into fresh water, such as the Ganges and the Amazons, but by far the greater number range all over our northern seas, together with their near relations the dolphins, and the bottle-nosed whales, and the strange narwhal, with its two solitary eye teeth, one only of which grows out as a long tusk. All these roam freely through the vast ocean home, coming into the still bays to bring up their young ones, which they nurse and suckle tenderly, afterwards moving off again in shoals to the open sea. There they will follow the ships, and sport and play, and probably we shall never know exactly

Footnote 188. Phocæna communis.

where their wanderings extend, though it seems that they prefer the northern hemisphere.

Among all the dolphin family the most voracious and bloodthirsty is the Grampus or Orca,[189] which is commonly called the “Killer Whale,” because it alone feeds on warm-blooded animals, seizing the seals with its strong, sharp, conical teeth, devouring even its own relations the porpoises, and attacking and tearing to pieces the larger whales. No lion or tiger could be more ruthless in its attacks than this large-toothed whale, which is sometimes as much as twenty-five feet long and has broad flippers. In vain even the mother walruses try to save their young ones by carrying them on their backs; the cunning Orca swims below her, and coming up with a jerk shakes the young one from its place of safety and swallows it in a moment. Nor do they merely fight single-handed, for many voyagers have seen them attack large whales in a pack like wolves, and in 1858 Mr. Scammon saw three killer whales fall upon a huge Californian Gray Whale and her young one, though even the baby whale was three times their size. They bit, they tore, and wounded them both till they sank, and the conquerors appeared with huge pieces of flesh in their mouths, as they devoured their prey. How much they can eat is shown by one orca having been killed which had the remains of thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals in its stomach!

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