A WHALE THRESHER.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 220, 27 September 1879, Page 4

A WHALE THRESHER.

[From the New York Sun.'] The schooner Martha, from George's Banks, brought, with a cargo of fish to this poi^ the largest whale thresher remembered by old market men to have ever been seen in this citv. It was caught in a pound net at Wood's Hole, Massachusetts, recently, and was killed by a lance. The last one exhibited in "Washington market was fifteen years ago, and it was so small a specimen of its kind that some fish dealers believed that it was a species of shark. The fish that arrived here recently was ex- < hibited by Mr C. A. Lewis. It was nearly fourteen feet long, and it monopolised the entire front of the stand. Persons stopped to examine it, and all day long a throng was pressing around it. Half of the length of the curious fish was body, and the other half tail. The tail tapered off gradually, and had been looped up by a rope attached to a beam above. | weight of the creature was GOO pounds. The naked skin on the back and sides was a uniform bluish drab colonr from the snout to the tip of the tail. The tail was as much a separate part of the body as a dog's tail is of its body, which appearance made it resemble a land or amphibious animal more than a fish* The eyes were as large as a cow's, and could be rolled in

their aoekefc, $fo> moqih was comthe^ teeth short* ehakp, an^qf a uniform length in both jaws. Sticking straight np from the middle of the back was a dark fin, eleven inches long, of the same colour 08 the body, tough and compact, yet neither bony or hard. The medial, pectoral, and caudal fins resembled the dorsal fins. They flared out horizontally, and were set, low. On the under side the body was of a mottled salmon colour. The fish yielded like caoutchouc to the finger, but on releasing the pressure the Bkin sprang back to its original form. The body, from end to end, seemed a mass of cartilage. The long tail is nsed by the animal like a raw-hide in attacking its enemy, the whale. It forms a sort of alliance with the sword fish, the latter thrusting its sword into the whale from below, and the thresher attacking it from above. The threshers run in shoals, and from ten to twenty will attack a whale at once. Those who have witnessed a combat between threshers and whales say that it is an exciting spectacle. The water flies in showers of foam in all directions,^ tho threshers hurl themselves at the whale like animated cowhides. For hoars they rain blows on the head and sides of the huge animal. Between the piercing thrusts of the swordfish and the flail-like blows of the thresher, a whale rarely escapes. From the carcass the victors get their food for many a day afterwards. Through the slit in the side of the thresher exhibited yesterday oozed bipod as red as that of a land animal. The gills were four in number on each side. The fish, is to be stuffed.