An error only too natural. D'Urmont Durville was similarly though not so fatally deceived. He saw at a distance what seemed a bank with breakers and eddies all around it, and certain patches upon it looked like rocks. Above and around this seeming bank the swallow and the stormy petrel raced and sported. The bank looked venerably grey, covered as it was with shells and madrepores. But the mighty mass suddenly moved, and two enormous columns of water which it threw high into the air, revealed the awakened Whale. The inhabitant of another planet who should descend towards ours in a balloon and survey it from a vast height would say to himself, "The only creatures that I can discover there are from one hundred to two hundred feet long, their arms are only twenty feet long, but their superb tail, thirty feet, magnificently beats the Sea, and enables them to advance with a speed and a majestic ease which make it very evident that they are the sovereigns of that planet." And by and bye he would add: "It is a great pity that the solid part of that globe should be deserted, or at best peopled only by creatures so small that they are invisible. The sea alone is inhabited and by a kind and gentle race. Here the family is held in honor, the mother nurses and suckles her young ones with tenderness, and although her arms are very short she contrives during the raging of the tempest to protect her little one by pressing it to her vast body." Whales are given to companionship. Formerly they were seen sailing along not only in pairs, but occasionally in large families of ten or twelve in the solitary seas. Nothing exceeded the grandeur of those vast and living fleets, sometimes lighted up by their own phosphorescence, and throwing to the height of thirty or forty feet in the Polar seas columns of water which smoked as it rose. They would approach a vessel, peaceably and in evident curiosity; looking upon her as some specimen of a new and strange species of fish; and they sported around and welcomed the visitor. In their joy they raised themselves half upright and then fell down again with a huge noise, making a boiling gulf as they sank. Their innocent familiarity went so far that they sometimes touched the ship or her boats. An imprudent confidence which was most cruelly deceived! In less than a century, the great species of the Whale have almost disappeared.