[
425]
immense quantity of oil in the head of the fish is applied?
They are probably twofold.
First, it may have some connection with the sustenance of the animal, in seasons of scarcity of food, and secondly, and more obviously, it appears to be a provision of nature, designed on the same principle on which birds are supplied with air-cells in their bones.
The whale, though a very intelligent fish, and with an affection for its ‘calf,’ almost human, has but a small brain, the great cavity of its skull being filled as described.
As the specific gravity of oil is considerably less than that of water, we can be at no loss to conjecture why the monster has so bountiful a supply, nor why it is that it carries the supply in its head.
As is well known, the whale is a warm-blooded mammal, as much so as the cow that roams our pastures, and cannot live by breathing the water alone.
Instead of the gill arrangement of other fishes, which enables them to extract from the water sufficient air to vitalize the blood, it has the lungs of the mammal, and needs to breathe the atmosphere.
The oil in the head, acting on the principle of the cork, enables it to ascend very rapidly, from great depths in the ocean, when it requires to breathe, or ‘blow.’
See how beautiful this oil arrangement is, too, in another aspect.
It enables the monster, when it requires rest, to lay its head on the softest kind of a pillow, an ocean wave, and sleep as unconcernedly as the child does upon the bosom of its mother.
On the day after the capture of the Ocmulgee, we chased and overhauled a French ship, bound to Marseilles.
After speaking this ship, and telling her that we were a United States cruiser, we bore away north, half west, and in a couple of hours made the island of Flores, the westernmost of the Azores, and a favorite island to be sighted by the whalers, for the correction of their chronometers.
Approaching it just at nightfall, we shortened sail, and lay off and on during the night.
This island is an exceedingly picturesque object.
It rises like a huge mountain from the depths of the sea, with the bluest and deepest of water all around it. It is rock-bound, and there is scarcely any part of it, where a ship might not haul alongside of the rocks, and make fast to the shore.
It rises to the height of a thousand feet and more, and is covered with a luxuriant
