The number of seamen engaged in this business, allowing 30 for each ship, 24 for a bark, 20 for a brig, and 18 for a schooner, would be more than 20,000. Importations of sperm and whale oil and whalebone into the United States in 1856 are as follows:-- Sperm oil, 80,941 bbls. Right whale oil, 197,890 bbls. Whalebone, 2,592,700 lbs. CHAPTER II. The Whale.--Its Zoology.--The largest known Animal.--Sperm Whale.--Right Whale.--Finback.--Bowhead. The Whale is the general name of an order of animals inhabiting the ocean, arranged in zoology under the name of _Cete_, or _Cetacae_, and belonging to the class _Mammalia_ in the Linnaean system. This animal is named whale from roundness, or from rolling. "While living in part or wholly in the ocean, it differs in many important respects from the fish tribes, and it is these peculiarities which render it a link between the creature of the land and of the sea. While it has the power of locomotion in the water, like other fishes, yet in other particulars it has no affinity with them; it is as much a mammal as the ox, or the elephant, or the horse--having warm blood, breathing air, bringing forth living young, and suckling them with true milk." The whale is the largest of all known animals. Some remarks upon the whale and its varieties will form the subject of the present chapter. 1. THE SPERM WHALE. The _Cachalot_, or _Physeter Macrocephalus._ The principal species are the black-headed, with a dorsal fin, and the round-headed, without a fin on the back, and with fistula in the snout. This whale is known at a distance by the peculiarity of his "spoutings" or "blows." He can be easily detected by whalemen, if he happens to be in company with other species of whales. He blows the water or vapor from his nostrils in a single column, to the height, perhaps, of twelve feet, inclining in a forward direction in an angle of forty-five degrees with the horizon, and visible for several miles. There is also a wonderful regularity as to time in which he "blows"--perhaps once in ten minutes. He remains on the surface of the water from forty-five to sixty minutes, and under water about the same time. Unless the whale is frightened, whalemen make quite correct calculation as to the chances of overtaking him, or meeting him, or when he will rise to the surface after he has "turned flukes." When the sperm whale is near, he can be easily distinguished by the form of his head, unlike any other variety of whale. Its head is enormous in bulk, being fully more than one third of the whole length of its body; and it ends like an abrupt and steep promontory, and is so hard for several feet from its front that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, for an iron to enter it--as impervious, indeed, to a harpoon as a bale of cotton.