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From their simultaneous observations, they were able to estimate the mammal's minimum length at more than 350 English feet;* this was because both the Shannon and the Helvetia were of smaller dimensions, although each measured 100 meters stem to stern.
Parts of the discarded gill-arches are gradually transformed into the three bones of the mammal's internal ear; just as other parts are converted into mouth cartilages, and as it is believed one of the gill clefts is converted into the Eustachian tube. In the Monotreme and Marsupial the ear-hole begins to be covered with a shell of cartilage; we have the beginning of the external ear.
My host described a mammal's tooth that weighed nearly fourteen pounds, which had been taken from a phosphate mine; it had been sent to a public room at Beaufort, South Carolina. A fossil shark's tooth, weighing four and a half pounds, was also found, and a learned ichthyologist has asserted that the owner of this remarkable relic of the past must have been one hundred feet in length.
As it grows it performs instinctive acts because its inherited nervous system operates in the purely mechanical manner of a lower mammal's nervous system. For these reasons an eminent psychologist has said that the mental ability of an infant six months old is about that of a well-bred fox terrier.
The mysterious denizen of the deep that had beaten the whale to death, ate out the huge mammal's tongue and had sunk again into the sea before we rowed near enough to distinguish its shape or size. It had disappeared as mysteriously as it had risen and seemingly all it had killed the mammal for was to eat its tongue.
There is little room to doubt that the little fleshy vestige in the mammal's eye is the shrunken remainder of the lateral eyelid of a remote fish-ancestor. A similar reminiscence is found in the pineal body, a small and useless object, about the size and shape of a hazel-nut, in the centre of the brain. When we examine the reptile we find a third eye in the top of the head.