[Illustration:  We Tell the Tale of a Whale]

Whales divide themselves into two great classes:  those furnished with teeth (the Denticete) and those in which the place of teeth is supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or “whalebone” of commerce (the Mysticete or Balaenidae).  The members of the Baleen Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the “Arctic Whale,” “Polar Whale,” “Greenland Whale,” “Bowhead,” “Right Whale,” or “Icebreaker.”

Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons.  Comparisons are illuminating.  The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in longitudinal measurement.  The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil each,—­lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy!  The eyes placed in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange.  The tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil.  The aorta is as big as a man’s waist and, at each pulsation of the heart, spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood.  The heart itself is more than a yard in transverse diameter.  The toothed whales carry the teeth in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca’ing Whale, the White Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins.  Only the toothed whale eats fish; the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life, called “brit” by the whalers.  The Bowhead that we have come up to the Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria.  He couldn’t eat a herring if by that one act he might attain immortality.

Whale errors die hard.  Artists persistently depict the big animals as spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales breathe out air only from their lungs.  They come to the surface for that purpose, the “blowing” being quite analogous to the breathing of land mammals.  Noticing the condensation of a whale’s breath up here in the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular blunder.  Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale) bulls.  “At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea.”  Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything but common or seaside air.

The Bowhead is hunted for his “whalebone”; the Cachalot or true Sperm, the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his head.