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Show 538 MR. R. BROWN ON THE CETACEANS [Nov. 12, mass*. Though, per se, the tail has no power, yet as the instrument through which the lumbar muscles (the tendinous attachments of which seem to be prolonged into the cartilaginous substance of the tail) work it exerts enormous force. The figure usually engraved in boys' books of sea adventures, and copied from Scoresby's 'Account of the Arctic Regions,' of a Whale tossing a boat and its crew up into the air, is generally looked upon by all the whalers to whom I have shown it as an artistic exaggeration. Accidents of this nature are very rare, and never proceed to such an extent; and I have no doubt that Dr. Scoresby's artist has taken liberties with his description, that worthy navigator being himself above any suspicion of exaggeration for the sake of effect, ('apt. Alexander Deuchars, who has now made upwards of fifty voyages into the Arctic regions, informed me that he had known a Whale toss a boat nearly 3 feet into the air, and itself rise so high out of the water that you could see beneath it, but that, if Scoresby's figure was correct, the Whale must have tossed the boat very many feet into the air-a feat which he did not think was within the bounds of, if not possibility, yet of probability. The teats are hardly the size of a cow's, are placed about tbe middle, and one inch from the edge of the sulcus, but in tbe dead animal are almost universally retracted within the white-coloured or spotted sulcus, in the middle of which they are situated. The milk is thick, rich, and rather sweet-tasted. The faecal evacuations of the Whale are red-coloured, most probably due to the red Cetochili and other animals which form the bulk of its food. The skin (including the cuticle) is about 1| inch in thickness all over the body, but is rather thicker on the tail, on which organ, however, it is of a uniform thickness. The blubber varies from about a foot to eighteen inches in thickness, tolerably uniformly throughout, except on the head, &c.; the colour is like lard or pork fat in young animals, but in the older ones rosy-coloured, from the quantity of nutrient blood-vessels in it. The flesh is dark and coarse-fibred, but when properly cooked tastes not unlike tough beef. When the French had whalers in Davis Strait, the sailors, with the usual aptitude of their nation for cuisine, made dainty dishes of it; but cur seamen, imbued with the virulent dietetic conservatism of tbe Saxon, prefer to grow scurvy-riddled rather than partake of this coarse though perfectly wholesome food. The best figure of the Right Whale is that of Scoresby; but in Harris's 'Collection of Voyages' there is a very good figure of the animal (almost as good as Scoresby's), accompanied by a very tolerable description. I think Scoresby's figure is erroneous, in so far as I have never been able to see the prominence behind the head which he figures; and the notch shown in the outline figure of the genus in the first edition of the ' British Museum Catalogue of Whales' does not exist in nature ; but as Dr. Gray does not mention * A tolerably good account of these and other points in the economy of the Cetacea, mixed up with a heterogeneous mass of errors, is to be found in the (deservedly?) neglected -Natural History of the Cetacea,' & c , by H . W . Dew-hurst (1834). |
