“The Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland.” By J. G. Millais. Longmans, Green, & Co., pp. 256–257. My friend, Captain H. G. Melsom, tells me that while hunting off the coast of Siberia he struck a blue whale which ran out three thousand feet of line and, with engines at full speed astern, towed the ship forward for seven hours at no time at a less speed than eight knots. Some years before this in Norway he shot a blue whale at five P. M., which dragged the ship with engines at full speed astern, until eleven P. M., when he slowed down to half speed; at one A. M. he changed to dead slow and he finally killed the whale at two o’clock in the morning. CHAPTER XII WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE WHALE’S LEGS If a whale is struck near the tail by the harpoon it is almost powerless to pull because the strain on the rope straightens out its body and the animal can swim only with difficulty. Practically all of the forward motion is developed by means of the flukes and the side fins are only used as balancing organs and in turning and rising to the surface. The flukes are not twisted in a rotary movement like the propeller of a ship, as is commonly believed, but wave straight up and down. While hunting in Alaska I had an excellent opportunity to see the manner in which a whale swims. I had climbed to the barrel at the masthead while we were following an enormous humpback and as the water was like glass save for the long swell, I could see 15 or 20 feet beneath the surface. Suddenly the dim outlines of the whale took shape in the green depths far below me but when near the surface the animal checked its upward rush, turned downward, and dove directly under the ship, rising a hundred fathoms away on the port beam. I could see every movement of the great body as clearly as though the whale had been suspended in mid-air. When the animal turned, the side fins were thrown outward but were pressed close to the body as it swam under the ship. [Illustration: Posterior view of a blue whale on the slip at Aikawa, Japan. The flukes have been cut off and the wide thin caudal portion of the body is well shown. ] A whale’s flippers must not be compared with the fins of a fish, for in structure the two are quite unlike. The flippers of all cetaceans are merely the fore-limbs of ordinary land mammals, which have become overlaid with blubber to form a paddle in adaptation to an aquatic life and have the bones, blood vessels, and nerves of the human arm. The flipper of the humpback whale has four greatly elongated fingers but in some other species there are five fingers as in the human hand.