The whale‐fishery has diminished its numbers, but not altered its mode of life. It is stated now that the whale believed to have visited the North Atlantic Ocean is a totally different species, a much more violent and dangerous animal than the northern whale, also smaller, and less rich in oil. The fishery for the latter ceased towards the end of the last century, but it is thought to be not wholly extinct. On September 17th, 1854, a whale, with its little one, appeared before St. Sebastian, in the Bay of Biscay; the mother escaped, but the young one was taken, and from a drawing of a skeleton of the latter MM. Eschricht and Rheinhardt, of Copenhagen, are convinced that it belonged to a species distinct from the Greenland whale; so that the name of ‘Mysticete’ has been applied to various whales.” [Illustration: THE NORTHERN WHALE (_Balina mysticetus_).] The sperm whale, says Maury, is a warm water animal; the _right_ whale delights in cold water. The log‐books of the American whalers show that the torrid zone is to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which it cannot pass; and that the right whale of the northern hemisphere and that of the southern are two different animals; and that the sperm whale has never been known to double the Cape of Good Hope—he doubles Cape Horn. Mr. Beale has done more to elucidate the habits and form of this whale than any other writer. Its great peculiarity of form is the head, presenting a very thick, blunt extremity, about a third of the whole length of the animal. The head, viewed in front, has a broad, flattened surface, rounded and contracted above, considerably expanded on the sides, and gradually contracted below, resembling in some degree the cut‐water of a ship. On the right side of the nose is a cavity for secreting and containing an oily fluid, which after death concretes into the substance called spermaceti, of which in a large whale there is not unfrequently a ton. The mouth extends nearly the whole length of the head, and the throat is capacious enough to give passage to the body of a man, presenting a strong contrast to the contracted gullet of the Greenland whale. Immediately beneath the black skin of the sperm whale is the blubber, or fat, termed “the blanket,” of a light yellowish colour, producing when melted the sperm oil. A specimen taken in 1829 near Whitstable measured sixty‐two feet in length. The oil was worth £320, exclusive of the spermaceti.(49) Many years since the _Samuel Enderby_, whaler, returned from the south with a cargo of sperm oil worth £40,000. [Illustration: CUTTING UP THE WHALE.]