ched to it. The "right" whale has no teeth like
the sperm whale. In place of teeth it has the well-known substance
called whalebone, which grows from the roof of its mouth in a number of
broad thin plates, extending from the back of the head to the snout.
The lower edges of these plates of whalebone are split into thousands of
hairs like bristles, so that the inside roof of a whale's mouth
resembles an enormous blacking brush! The object of this curious
arrangement is to enable the whale to catch the little shrimps and small
sea-blubbers, called "medusae," on which it feeds. I have spoken before
of these last as being the little creatures that gave out such a
beautiful pale-blue light at night. The whale feeds on them. When he
desires a meal he opens his great mouth and rushes into the midst of a
shoal of medusae; the little things get entangled in thousands among the
hairy ends of the whalebone, and when the monster has got a large enough
mouthful, he shuts his lower-jaw and swallows what his net has caught.

The wisdom as well as the necessity of this arrangement is very plain.
Of course, while dashing through the sea in this fashion, with his mouth
agape, the whale must keep his throat closed, else the water would rush
down it and choke him. Shutting his throat then, as he does, the water
is obliged to flow out of his mouth as fast as it flows in; it is also
spouted up through his blow-holes, and this with such violence that many
of the little creatures would be swept out along with it, but for the
hairy-ended whalebone which lets the sea-water out, but keeps the
medusae in.

Well, let us return to our "cutting-in." After the upper-jaw came the
lower-jaw and throat, with the tongue. This last was an enormous mass
of fat, about as large as an ox, and it weighed fifteen hundred or two
thousand pounds. After this was got in, the rest of the work was
simple. The blubber of the body was peeled off in great strips,
beginning at the neck and being cut spirally towards the tail. It was
hoisted on board by the blocks, the captain and mates cutting, and the
men at the windlass hoisting, and the carcass slowly turning round until
we got an unbroken piece of blubber, reaching from the water to nearly
as high as the mainyard-arm. This mass was nearly a foot thick, and it
looked like fat pork. It was cut off close to the deck, and lowered
into the blubber-room, where the two men stationed there attacked it
with kniv