is fastened, yet not deep into the fat, wherewith they turn the fish at pleasure. Then they cut another piece down hard by this, which is also hauled up into the ship, where it is cut into pieces a foot square. The knives used are, with their hafts, about the length of a man,” and so on. Mr. Brierly tells us that the most important natural enemy of the whale on the coast of Australia is the “killer,” a kind of large porpoise, with a blunt head and large teeth. These “killers” often attack the whale, and worry it like a pack of dogs, and sometimes kill it. The whalemen regard these creatures as important allies, for when they see from the look‐out that a whale has been “hove‐to” by them they are pretty sure of capturing it. The killers show no fear of the boats, but will attack the whale at the same time; and if a boat is stove in, which often happens, they will not hurt the men when in the water. The Australian natives about Twofold Bay say the killers are the spirits of their own people, and when they see them will pretend to point out particular individuals they have known. Some are very large, exceeding twenty‐five feet; they blow from the head, in the same manner as the whale. The homes of whales are hardly known. Where the northern whale breeds has long been a puzzling question among whalemen. It is a cold‐water animal. Maury asks:—“Is the nursery for the great whale in the Polar Sea, which has been so set about and hemmed in with a ledge of ice that man may not trespass there? This providential economy still further prompts the question, Whence comes all the food for the young whales there? Do the teeming whalers of the Gulf Stream convey it there also, in channels so far in the depths of the sea that no enemy may waylay and spoil it in the long journey? It may generally be believed that the northern whale, which is now confined to the Polar Sea, descended annually into the temperate region of the Atlantic, as far as the Bay of Biscay, and that it was only the persecution of the whale‐fishers which compelled it to seek its frozen retreat. This opinion is now shown to be erroneous, and to have rested only on the confounding of two distinct species of whale. Like other whales, the northern is migratory, and changes its quarters according to the seasons; and the systematic registers of the Danish colonists of Greenland show that often the same individual appears at the same epoch in the same fiord. The females of the southern whale visit the coasts of the Cape in June to bring forth their young, and return to the high seas in August or September. It was supposed that the migration of the northern whale was for a similar purpose. This, however, is not now considered to be the case. Its movements are attributed to climatal changes alone, and especially to the transport of ice into Baffin’s Bay. It lives entirely in the midst of glaciers, and therefore is found in the south during winter and in the north during summer.