up again to make good his regular allowance of air.  And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below.  Remark, however, that in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one they are alike.  Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere descending for good?  How obvious it is it, too, that this necessity for the whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase.  For not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight.  Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!

In man, breathing is incessantly going on—­one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will.  But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.

It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling.  But owing to the mystery of the spout—­whether it be water or whether it be vapor—­no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head.  Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories.  But what does he want of them?  No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.

Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal—­like the grand Erie Canal—­ is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose.  But then again, what has the whale to say?  Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.  Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!

Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street.  But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and discharged through the