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It is notorious how desperately male seals fight, both with their teeth and claws, during the breeding-season; and their hides are likewise often covered with scars. Male sperm-whales are very jealous at this season; and in their battles "they often lock their jaws together, and turn on their sides and twist about"; so that their lower jaws often become distorted.
Taking a match from his waistcoat pocket and lighting a long clay pipe, he spoke: Along in the fifties I was cabin-boy on the whaling-ship Nimrod, Alarson Coffin, master. We were cruising on the coast of Brazil when, one day, the lookout, stationed at the masthead, reported a large school of sperm-whales off our lee-beam.
Sperm-whales, battles of male. Sphingidae, coloration of the. Sphinx, Humming-bird. Sphinx, Mr. Bates on the caterpillar of a. Sphinx moth, musky odour of. Spiders, parental feeling in; male, more active than female; proportion of the sexes in; secondary sexual characters of; courtship of male; attracted by music; male, small size of. Spilosoma menthastri, rejected by turkeys.
Thecla rubi, protective colouring of. Thecophora fovea. Theognis, selection in mankind. Theridion, stridulation of males of. Theridion lineatum. Thomisus citreus, and Thomisus floricolens, difference of colour in the sexes of. Thompson, J.H., on the battles of sperm-whales.
Whales also afford evidence of the relation existing between the pugnacity of the males and their large size compared with that of the female; the males of the right-whales do not fight together, and they are not larger, but rather smaller, than their females; on the other hand, male sperm-whales fight much together, and their bodies are "often found scarred with the imprint of their rival's teeth," and they are double the size of the females.
Five weeks passed away, as we have already remarked, and at the end of that time the Red Eric found herself, one beautiful sunny afternoon, becalmed on the breast of the wide ocean with a strange vessel, also a whaler, a few miles distant from her, and a couple of sperm-whales sporting playfully about midway between the two ships.
Sperm-whales began gittin' scarce when I was a boy, and pretty soon there was nothin' left but bow-head or right whales, that tried to keep out of the way of human bein's by livin' far up North; but when they came to shootin' 'em with cannons which would carry three or four miles, the whale's day was up, and he got scarcer and scarcer, until he faded out altogether.
The day before we made it we saw two shoals of sperm-whales. After we doubled the south-west cape of Van Diemen's Land, we saw a large sperm whale off Maria's-Islands, but did not see any more, being very thick weather and blowing hard, till within fifteen leagues of the latitude of Port Jackson.
Christopher Hursey, a stout Nantucket whaleman, cruising about after right whales, ran into a stiff northwest gale and was carried far out to sea. He struck a school of sperm-whales, killed one, and brought blubber home.
"But I have got adrift from what I was going to tell you about the South Sea whalers. You see, the whales in those seas are generally sperm-whales, with blunt bottle-noses, altogether unlike the fish about here. There is not much difference in the way of killing them, except that one has not to go among the ice for them, in the way we have here, as they are met with in `schools' in the open sea.
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