This whale swallows quantities of small fishes, and has been known to eject from its stomach a fish as large as a moderate‐sized salmon. This species is gregarious; and the herds, called “schools,” are females and young males. Mr. Beale saw 500 or 600 in one school. With each female school are one to three large “bulls,” or “schoolmasters,” as they are termed by the whalers. The full‐grown males almost always go in search of food. A large whale will yield eighty, and sometimes one hundred, barrels of oil. Among the habits of the whale are “breaching,” or leaping clear out of the water and falling back on its side, so that the breach may be seen on a clear day from the mast‐head at six miles’ distance; in “going ahead” the whale attains ten or twelve miles an hour, which Mr. Beale believes to be its greatest velocity; “lob‐tailing” is lashing the water with its tail. The dangers and hairbreadth escapes in the capture are very numerous. In 1839 there were discovered among rubbish in a tower of Durham Castle the bones of a sperm whale, which, from a letter of June 20th, 1661, in the Surtees Collection, is shown to have been cast ashore at that time, and _skeletonised_ in order to ornament this old tower. Clusius describes, in 1605, a sperm whale thrown ashore seven years before, near Scheveling, where Cuvier supposed its head to be still preserved, and there is an antiquity of the kind still shown there. The whale chase is an exciting scene. Sometimes the whale places himself in a perpendicular position, with the head downwards, and rearing his tail on high, beats the water with awful violence. The sea foams, and vapours darken the air; the lashing is heard several miles off, like the roar of a distant tempest. Sometimes he makes an immense spring, and rears his whole body above the waves, to the admiration of the experienced whaler, but to the terror of those who see for the first time this astonishing spectacle. Other motions, equally expressive of his boundless strength, attract the attention of navigators at the distance of miles. The whole structure of the whale exhibits most admirable adaptation to his situations and the element in which he lives, in the toughness and thickness of his skin and disposition of the coating of blubber beneath, which serves the purpose—if we may be permitted to use so homely a simile—of an extra great‐coat to keep him warm, and prevent his warm red blood from being chilled by the icy seas. But provision is especially made to enable him to descend uninjured to very great depths. The orifices of the nostrils are closed by valves, wonderfully suited to keep out the water from the lungs, notwithstanding the pressure. In one species they are shaped like cones, which fit into the orifice like corks in the neck of a bottle, and the greater the pressure the tighter they hold. The most surprising fact in the whale, probably, is the power of descending to enormous depths below