Whales are not always feeding, of course, and when not so engaged, and when they are feeling lively, they may amuse themselves with play, much as other animals do. The play of a sportive whale is not of a kind that I ever cared to join in. They sometimes come up from the depths at great speed, and throw their bodies clean out of the water. This is called “breaching.” Breaching may not be the play of a whale that is particularly sportive, but due to an effort to clear the body of barnacles and crabs and such-like. And they sometimes raise their flukes high in air, and bring them down on the surface again, or “lobtail,” the blow upon the surface of the water making a noise like a great gun that can be heard for a great distance. They have other things which they do with their flukes, which seem to be endowed with a special sense of touch, like the fingers of a blind person. Indeed, as I think I have said, the sight of whales is very poor. The eyes of a whale are so placed in his head that there are considerable angles in front and behind throughout which he could see nothing if he had the best of eyes; but it is more than that. His eyes do not seem to be of the best. I have never chanced to see any explanation of this which seemed reasonable, but one occurred to me after I had learned to swim, which I did a few years later. It is not possible for me to see outlines clearly under water, and I suppose that the same thing is true of any normal person. The reason is that the curvature of the surface of the eye is adapted to use in air. Water is, of course, more dense than air, optically as well as in other ways, and to see well in water the eye surfaces would have to be much more curved. In other words, the eye would have to be very near-sighted in air to have normal sight under water. It is of some importance to the whale to have normal sight under water, although there again is the difficulty of nearly total absence of light {57} at great depths. But I should expect to find the whale very near-sighted, and perhaps with an eye somewhat similar to that of nocturnal animals. I do not know whether anybody has ever observed that. I never have. It is somewhat difficult to make such observations. I have interrupted my narrative to say something about the habits of whales, for I hope that has made it evident how hard it was for a greenhorn like me to tell the number of whales in the pod from the number of spouts that I could identify at any one time. In fact, there were times when all had disappeared; but I stayed there, crouched on my hunkers just forward of the lubber-hole, with my back against the mast, and I watched those drifting plumes of vapor, and I was much excited and quite happy.