With Newfoundland’s history in mind we may turn to the American Pacific where, because of different conditions, the story has been only partially duplicated. From Mexico to Bering Sea there is an enormous extent of coast line where the feeding grounds lie close to shore and sustain a proportionally greater number of whales than in the restricted area of Newfoundland and Labrador. Here, as in every other ocean, the result of persistent persecution will be inevitable, but under such conditions it will be longer deferred. There is a slow but constant yearly decrease in the number of whales taken along the Pacific Coast, and yet if stations are not concentrated, undoubtedly the industry will continue to be a profitable one for several years to come. Near the islands of the sub-Antarctic, conditions are more favorable for shore whaling than in any other portion of the world. The waters of these seas are especially productive of the shrimp (_Euphausia_) and other plankton upon which most of the large Cetacea feed, and thousands of fin whales are present where there are dozens in other oceans. This great abundance of marine life caused the development of the floating factories which until recently operated without restriction and are the most pernicious agencies of modern invention in the wholesale destruction of whales. A floating factory consists of a large steamer equipped with blubber try works and can be moved about from place to place as the feeding grounds change. Four or five vessels hunt from each floating factory, supplying it with whales from which the blubber is stripped off and tried out on board the large ship. When operations first began in the sub-Antarctic, whales could be killed so easily that in some instances only the thickest portions of the blubber were taken and the remainder left upon the carcass to be turned adrift; thus but a fractional portion of the value of each whale was secured while thousands of animals were killed. A blue whale eighty feet long, treated in this manner, would probably not be worth more than $40 or $50, while in Japan, where the by-products are highly utilized, a specimen of equal size would have a value of $4,000. Very fortunately at South Georgia, one of the largest whaling centers of the far southern waters, the British Government realized that such pernicious activities could only result in the quick ruin of the industry, and enacted laws which compelled the floating factories to use the carcasses as well as the blubber. [Illustration: A skeleton of a finback whale in the American Museum of Natural History. ] While to the early hunters on the South Atlantic grounds the supply of whales must have seemed inexhaustible, yet the concentrated activity of the last ten years has caused alarming inroads into the great herds which fed along the edge of the Antarctic Circle.