WELLINGTON ATHENÆUM.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VIII, Issue 714, 5 June 1852, Page 2

WELLINGTON ATHENÆUM.

On Thursday evening Dr. Ralph delivered to the members of this Institution a very interesting .and able lecture on the natural history of the Whale. After alluding to the capture of the whale,with theinstruments necessary thereto, and the process of " cutting-iu" and trying out having been mentioned, the lecturer gave a sketch of the whale fishery; that the Norwegians as far back as the year 890 were in the practice of capturing the whale for its oil only, and that the Biscayans appeared to be the first nation which prosecuted whale fishing' as a regular commercial pursuit between the 12th and 14th centuries, and which was for the purpose of obtaining the flesh as an arti^e of food and the whalebone, the oil pot proving very-abundant; When Spitzberg^w|is^di§covered in, 1596, the English, Dutch, French and Danes entered upon the fishery, but the Dutch far exceeded the other nations in success. They built a village called Smeerenberg, or Melting Town, on the Island of Amsterdam, north of Spitzbergen, and in 1680 had 260 ships and 14,000 sailors employed in their fishery. The Americans then came into the field and carried on the fishery with considerable success. The lecturer then went into the zoological characters of the whale and its position in the - animal kingdom, first shewing that animals were divided into those possessing a spinal column and those without &ny spine, namely—the vertebrate and invertebrate animals; he pointed out that the whale belonged to the former, which grand division was subdivided into., mammalia, or suck-giving animals, birds, reptiles, and fishes, and that the whale was, properly speaking, a mammal, and not a fish, as it was commonly called ; for it agreed in -most of its characters with those peculiar to mammals, producing its young alive, supporting it by means of milk, carrying on its respiration directly in contact with the air and not under water as fishes do, and possessing a heart with four cavities aod a double circulation of blood, namely —one through the lungs and another through the body generally, with a warm blood composed of disks of a circular form : it could not by any possibility be referred to the class fishes, which reproduce their species by spawn or eggs, caring little for their offspring — which breathe only J)y means of gills under water —have a heart containing two cavities and a single circulation of cold blood and bodies usually covered with scales : so that the fishlike character of the whale was merely that of adaptation to the peculiar element in which it. had its existence, nameh the water. The cc-. 1 taceous, or the whale tribe, was characterized by possessing a long body furnished with anterior er fore extremities only, namely, the paddles or fin-like organs^and a tail expanded ho-1 rizontally. The skin, called the blubber, wasi loaded with oil, and served several purposes to i the animal t that of conferring buoyancy, the power of retaining- animal heat, and of sustaining the force of immense pressure at great depths. The respiration of these animals was carried on by means of the blow holes placed on its head, by which the air gained access to the lungs; and the eye was remarkable for the thickness of its wall, the cavity of the eye itself being only one-third that of the diameter of the whole organ. The cetaceans proper were carnivorous, feeding upon squids, or the young of cuttle fish, seablubber and swarms of minute animals which inhabit the ocean, arid this order of whales was (divided into the dolphin tribe, comprising the porpoise, grampus, narwal or sea unicorn possessing a small head and teeth usually in both jaws, $:he spermaceti whale with a head one third the whole length of the animal and teeth in the lower jaw. The whalebone whale, or right whale, possessing a large head, no teeth, but a screening or sifting apparatus called baleen, or whalebone, consisting of plates of the substances known, as whalebone descending from the roof of the mouth, through which the animal sifted out the water after it had received it into its mouth, thus leaving behind the food which had been intro-

duced by means of it. The Lecturer then concluded by noticing how the whaler had been the first to open communication with the civilized and uncivilized maritime nations, inducing: by his report the merchant to send his ships to new ports, and causing the" germs of colonies to be fixed on the remotest islands of the globe, and that the whaler, like the backwoodsman of America, seemed to retire before the advance of civilization. There was a very numerous attendance of members and visitors by whom the hall of the Institute was well filled, and who by their repeated applause evinced the gratification which the lecture had afforded them. *