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Both kinds grow to an enormous size sometimes to seventy feet in length, but there is considerable difference in their appearance, especially about the head. In a former chapter I have partly described the head of a right whale, which has whalebone instead of teeth, with its blow-holes on the back of the head. The sperm whale has large white teeth in its lower-jaw and none at all in the upper.
After the upper-jaw came the lower-jaw and throat, with the tongue. This last was an enormous mass of fat, about as large as an ox, and it weighed fifteen hundred or two thousand pounds. After this was got in, the rest of the work was simple. The blubber of the body was peeled off in great strips, beginning at the neck and being cut spirally towards the tail.
He has two sharp tusks in the upper jaw, projecting about an inch and a half from the gum. These are exactly like the lower-jaw tusks of a boar, but they incline in the contrary direction, viz., downward, and they are used as weapons of defence. The horns of the red deer seldom exceed eight inches in length, and have no more than two points upon each antler, formed by a fork-like termination.
These are generally old bulls, which have become wise from experience, and give the whalers great trouble sometimes carrying away several harpoons and lines. The lower-jaw of one old bull of this kind was found to be sixteen feet long, and it had forty-eight teeth, some of them a foot long. A number of scars about his head showed that this fellow had been in the wars.
When he desires a meal he opens his great mouth and rushes into the midst of a shoal of medusae; the little things get entangled in thousands among the hairy ends of the whalebone, and when the monster has got a large enough mouthful, he shuts his lower-jaw and swallows what his net has caught. The wisdom as well as the necessity of this arrangement is very plain.
When two bull-whales take to fighting, their great effort is to catch each other by the lower-jaw, and, when locked together, they struggle with a degree of fury that cannot be described. It is not often that the sperm whale actually attacks a ship; but there are a few cases of this kind which cannot be doubted.
Head of a chick embryo, four days old, from below. n nasal pit, o upper-jaw process of the first gill-arch, u lower-jaw process of same, k double apostrophe second gill-arch, sp choroid fissure of eye, s gullet. Heads of chick embryos: 2.309 from the end of the fourth, 2.310 from the beginning of the fifth week. There is little to be said of the development of the lower sense-organs.
And when a tooth in the lower-jaw is the cause of headach, a pain sometimes affects the tendons of the muscles of the neck, which are attached near the jaws. But the clavus hystericus, or pain about the middle of the parietal bone on one side of the head, I have seen produced by the second of the molares, or grinders, of the under-jaw; of which I shall relate the following case.
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