Such teeth are beautifully adapted to the animal's feeding habits. The baleen whale feeds on a kind of jelly fish. We saw at times the sea covered with these flat, round, whitish living discs. The whale swims through an area of this food with its mouth open. When it has obtained a mouthful, it closes its jaws. The water is forced out between the slab-like teeth; the jelly fish remain tangled in the hair to be gulped down. Our first job after the cutting in of the whale was to cut the baleen from the jaw. It was cut away in bunches of ten or a dozen slabs held together by the gums and stowed away in the hold not to be touched again until later in the voyage. [Illustration: "Trying Out"] While the baleen was being prepared for stowage, the lid was removed from the try-works, uncovering the two big copper caldrons. A fire was started in the furnace with kindling and a handful of coal, but kept going thereafter with tried-out blubber called "scrap." Two men dressed in oil-skins were sent down into the blubber-room as the portion of the hold was called in which the blanket pieces of blubber had been stowed. Their oil-skins were to protect them from the oil which oozed from the blubber. Oilskins, however, are but slight protection as I learned later when I was sent into the blubber room at the taking of another whale. The oil soaks through the water-proof oil-skins and saturates one's clothes and goes clear through to the skin leaving it as greasy as if it had been rubbed with oil. A whale's blubber lies immediately beneath its skin, which is black and rubbery and about a quarter of an inch thick. The blubber is packed between this thin covering and the flesh in a layer of pink and opalescent fat from six inches to two feet thick. The blubber is so full of oil that the oil exudes from it. One can squeeze the oil from a piece of raw blubber as water from a sponge.