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Updated: May 6, 2025
These occupations do not end here, for they are intrepid hunters, or, if they prefer it, intrepid fishers for the manatee. On the morning of their arrival the young fellows assisted at a very interesting expedition of this nature. Two of these herbivorous cetaceans had just been signaled in the black waters of the Cayaratu, which comes in at Fonteboa.
Was it one of those "right" whales, which the fishermen of the Northern Ocean seek most particularly? Those cetaceans, which lack the dorsal fin, but whose skin covers a thick stratum of lard, may attain a length of eighty feet, though the average does not exceed sixty, and then a single one of those monsters furnishes as much as a hundred barrels of oil.
I made Conseil notice the considerable development of the lobes of the brain in these interesting cetaceans. No mammal, except man, has such a quantity of brain matter; they are also capable of receiving a certain amount of education, are easily domesticated, and I think, with other naturalists, that if properly taught they would be of great service as fishing-dogs.
"What's that, sir?" "Tomorrow at about this time, we'll need to reopen the hatches to renew the Nautilus's air." "No argument, sir, since our craft breathes in the manner favored by cetaceans." "But if these Papuans are occupying the platform at that moment, I don't see how you can prevent them from entering." "Then, sir, you assume they'll board the ship?" "I'm certain of it."
These poor cetaceans have been so hunted that they have become very rare in the Amazon and its affluents, and so little time is left them to grow that the giants of the species do not now exceed seven feet. What are these, after manatees twelve and fifteen feet long, which still abound in the rivers and lakes of Africa? But it would be difficult to hinder their destruction.
There is nothing remarkable in the digestive apparatus of the cetaceans except about the mouth, which is, as you know, the essentially variable point among animals. To begin with, the cetacean tongue has the most original appearance possible.
"Well, captain," I said, "on behalf of the baleen whales, there's still time " "It's pointless to run any risks, professor. The Nautilus will suffice to disperse these sperm whales. It's armed with a steel spur quite equal to Mr. Land's harpoon, I imagine." The Canadian didn't even bother shrugging his shoulders. Attacking cetaceans with thrusts from a spur! Who ever heard of such malarkey!
Bats were, by the earliest observers, naturally supposed to have a close relationship to birds, and cetaceans to fishes. It is almost superfluous to observe that all now agree that these mammals make not even an approach to either one or other of the two inferior classes.
If we do NOT know them all if Nature has still secrets in the deeps for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes, or cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species, of an organisation formed to inhabit the strata inaccessible to soundings, and which an accident of some sort has brought at long intervals to the upper level of the ocean.
Old legends even claim that these cetaceans led fishermen to within a mere seven leagues of the North Pole. Although this feat is fictitious, it will someday come true, because it's likely that by hunting whales in the Arctic or Antarctic regions, man will finally reach this unknown spot on the globe. We were seated on the platform next to a tranquil sea.
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