2. Another example of the application of the principles of natural science, may be adduced with respect to my Father’s practice in the capture of certain harpooned whales. In the most usual habits of the mysticetus, when struck in the Greenland seas, it descends to a considerable depth, generally 600 or 700 fathoms, and, after an interval of about half an hour, or so, returns spontaneously to the surface for respiration. But sometimes, especially when a taught strain has been held on the line, the whale continues to press so determinately into the depths of the ocean that it dies by a process similar to drowning. In that case the heaving up of the capture becomes a matter of great labour and difficulty, and, because of the liability of the harpoon to draw, or of the lines to part, of much uncertainty as to the result. It is a matter, therefore, of much importance to avoid the possible contingency of a harpooned whale “dying down.” The process ordinarily adopted for inducing the return of the fish to the surface, after the downward course is suspended, is to haul on the lines as soon as any impression can be produced, so as to stimulate to action and urge an ascending motion. In very many cases this process is effective, but by no means in all. For sometimes so desperate and continuous is the effort to get down that, when necessity might urge a return to the surface for respiration, the power to return no longer remains, and the helpless monster dies at its utmost depression. My Father, with his peculiar felicity of consideration and device, assumed a measure of proceeding as _apparently_ unfitting as it was novel in its character. When the usual processes for the obtaining of the fish’s return to the surface had failed, and no prospect remained but that it must die where it was, he would throw off the turns of his line round the stem or “loggerhead” of the boat, and allow an extent of fifty or a hundred fathoms more to run freely out and sink in the water. The meaning of the device was this:—The entangled whale had no doubt descended deep in the water, as its ordinary mode of escaping from its natural enemies; but the attachment and restraint of the line it could not escape from. It was an instinct with it, therefore, as he conceived,—as in the case of some well-known quadrupeds, which may be driven but will not be led,—to resist the restraining force, and to struggle to distance the point from which the restraint proceeds. The untoward effect of this instinct, my Father supposed, might be diverted by rapidly slacking out a large extent of the entangling line, so that it might sink _below_ the place of the fish, and so _draw downward_; for the same instinct which had incited it so perseveringly to dive, might naturally be expected to urge it, under this change of circumstances, to an upward course.