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Most of them are finbacks, though these are always accompanied by numbers of humpbacks and a few "right" whales the most valuable of all the southern cetacea except the spermaceti or cachalot. The latter, however, though they will travel in company with the flying finback and the timid humpback and "right" whale, has no fear of the killers.
“That’s well done!” growled Hearne, shrugging his shoulders, while his companions shook themselves and cursed the humpback. Besides these two kinds of cetacea we had observed several right-whales, and these are the most usually met with in the southern seas. They have no fins, and their blubber is very thick. The taking of these fat monsters of the deep is not attended with much danger.
The mode of origin of the Monodelphia from these is a very difficult problem, for the most part left open by Professor Haeckel. As regards the latter question, I have little doubt that the Sirenia connect the Ungulata with the Proboscidea; and none, that the Cetacea are extremely modified Carnivora. The passage between the Seals and the Cetacea by Zeuglodon is complete.
In the ichthyosaurus, in the plesiosaurus, in the whales, in the porpoises, in the seals, and in others, we have shortening of the bones, but no reduction in the number either of the fingers or of their joints, which are, on the contrary, multiplied in Cetacea and the ichthyosaurus. And even in the turtles we have eight carpal bones and five digits, while no finger has less than two phalanges.
The Seer-King would have detached a cohort of white whales, but the animosity of my tribes might have provoked combat. I left the cetacea with some foreboding. They were allied in some degree to man; they were capable of some human impressions; their blood was warm like mine; they breathed with lungs; they had double hearts; and nourished kindness for their offspring.
Those and they are many who vaguely think that science is something different from common-sense, and that any book is scientific which talks about perihelia and asymptotes and cetacea, will find their vague notions here well corroborated.
I saw the Crimson Dragon some miles away, but there were no traces of her boats. The crews of the launches were fathoms deep in the ocean! "I passed the cape of Greenland, rounded the base of Mount Hecla, and was escorted to the abode of the king of the cetacea by a multitude of his subjects.
"The fluid was mysteriously expelled from me. I breathed as freely of the water as a moment before I had breathed of the air! A weight was lifted from my brain, which had before been crushing it, and my temples grew suddenly cool. A spiracle had developed at the apex of my cranium, and I exuded water through a cavity or 'blow-hole' in the top of my head, like the cetacea around me!"
They are vegetarians, the whales feed on animals; the former never have the ribs articulated in the mode in which they are in some of the latter; the former have pectoral mammæ, and the latter are provided with two inguinal mammary glands, and have the nostrils enlarged into blowers, which the former have not. The former thus constitute the order Sirenia, while the latter belong to the Cetacea.
Really, by-the-by, I cannot give you a better instance of what I mean, than in my little diatribe on the Geryon Trifurcifer, a small reptile which I found, some years ago, inhabiting the mud of the salt lakes of Balkhan, which fills up a long-desired link between the Chelonia and the Perenni branchiate Batrachians, and, as I think, though Professor Brown differs from me, connects both with the Herbivorous Cetacea, Professor Brown is an exceedingly talented man, but a little too cautious in accepting any one's theories but his own.
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