A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.  The fissure is about a foot across.  Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape.  Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth.  Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam.  Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went?  The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned.  The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time.  In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.  Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability.  At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.

In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning these blinds.  One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous “whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:  “There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”

This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw.  Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.

As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” “blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances.  But in this particular, the demand has long been on the decline.  It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion.  And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.