By DAVID STARR JORDAN.
Long ago, in the old Devonian times, when life was very leisurely, all the beasts and people that there were lived in the sea together. The air was dull and murky on the land. It was so light that it gave no support to the body, and so those that ventured about in it had to lie prone on the ground all the time wherever they went. So they preferred to stay in the water, where motion is much easier. Then, too, water is so much better to breathe than air, if one has gills fitted for it! He has only to open his mouth and the water rushes in. Then he has only to shut his mouth and the water rushes out backward, bathing his gills on the way. Thus, the air dissolved in the water purifies all the little drops of blood that run up and back through the slender tubes of which the gills are made.
But in those days, besides the gills, some of the beasts of the sea had also a sac in the throat above the stomach in which they could stow away air which they took from the atmosphere itself. This served them in good stead when they were in crowded places, in which the air dissolved in the water would fail them.
And those which were so provided used to venture farther and farther out of the water, pushing their way heavily on the ground. And those which could put forth most effort survived, until at last their descendants were able to maintain themselves on the land altogether. These gave rise to the races of reptiles and birds and mammals, the ancestors of all the land beasts that you know, as well as men and women and all the monkey people. But it was very long ago when this happened, and because these ancestors came finally out of the water they have no part in the story I am trying to tell to-day.
Those that remained in the water grew more and more contented with their condition. Because the medium in which they lived was as heavy as their bodies, they swam without much effort,and effort not being needed, it was not put forth. As there was food enough in the water, they did not need to go on land. As they did not go on land, they did not use their lungs for breathing, the air sac gradually shrank away, or was used for some other purpose, and all the parts of the body became adjusted for life in water, as those of their cousins who left the sea became fitted for the life in air. Being now fishes for good, all the progress since then has made them with each succeeding century more and more decidedly fishy.
And because they are fishes they are contented to live in little brooks, which would not satisfy you and me at all. But our ancestors in the early days were more ambitious, and by struggle and effort won what seems to us a larger heritage.
So it happened one spring when the ice melted out from some little brook that flows down from somebody's hills somewhere toward some river that sets toward the Mississippi, the little fishes began to run.
And first of all came the lampreys, but they hardly count as fishes, for they have yet to learn the first principles of fishiness. A fish is a creature whose arms and legs are developed as fins, having cartilaginous rays spreading out fanlike to form an oar for swimming. But the lamprey has no trace of arm or leg, not even a bone or cartilage hidden under the skin. And its ancestors never had any limbs at all, for the earliest lamprey embryo shows no traces of them. If the ancestors ever had limbs, the descendants would never quite forget it. Some little trace would be kept by the clinging force of heredity, and at some time or another this rudiment would appear. And the lower jaw they lack too, for that is really another pair of limbs joined together in front—as it were, a pair of short hands clasped together and never unlocked.
But though the lampreys have no limbs and no jaws and are not fishes anyhow, they do not know the difference, and come up the brook in the spring, rushing up the rapids, swirling about in the eddies, just as if they were real fishes and owned the brook themselves. They are long, slender, and slippery, shaped like eels, without any scales and with only a little fin, and that along the back and tail, an outgrowth from the vertebral column. The vertebral column itself is limp and soft, the vertebræ only imperfectly formed and made of soft cartilage. In front the lamprey seems to be cut off short, but if we look carefully we see that the body ends in a round disk of a mouth, and that this disk is beset by rows of sharp teeth. A row of the sharpest of these is placed on the tongue, and two of these are above the gullet, for the tongue to scrape against them. And the rest are all blunt and are scattered over thesurface of the mouth, which has no lips nor jaws, but is surrounded by a belt of fringes. When the lamprey is hungry he puts his mouth against the side of some fish, exhausts the water between, and then the pressure of the outside water holds him there tightly. When this is done, the fish swims away and the lamprey rides with it, giving no thought to where he is going, but all the while scraping away the flesh with his rasplike teeth. When he has filed off enough fish flesh to satisfy his hunger he lets go, and goes off about his business. The fish, who does not know what hurt him, goes off to get well if he can. Usually he can not, for the water of the brook is full of the germs of little toadstool-like plants, and these fasten themselves on the fish's wounds and make them bigger and bigger, until at last the cavity of the abdomen is pierced and little creatures of many kinds, plant and animal, go in there and plunder all this fish's internal organs, to carry them away for their own purposes.
But when the lampreys come up the April brook it is not to feed on fishes, nor is it to feed at all. Nature is insistent that the race should be kept up, and every animal is compelled to attend to the needs of the species, even though it be at the sacrifice of all else. If she were not so, the earth and the seas would be depopulated, and this is a contingency toward which Nature has never looked.
The lampreys come up the stream to spawn, and while on this errand they fasten their round mouths to stones or clods of earth, that the current may not sweep them away. When so fastened they look like some strange dark plant clinging to the bottom of the brook. When the spawning season is over some of them still remain there, forgotten by Nature, who is now busied with other things, and they wear their lives away still clinging—a strange, weird piece of brook-bottom scenery which touched the fancy of Thoreau.
When the young are hatched they are transparent as jelly, blind and toothless, with a mouth that seems only a slit down the front end of the body. These little creatures slip down the brook unobserved, and hide themselves in the grass and lily pads till their teeth are grown and they go about rasping the bodies of their betters, grieving the fishes who do not know how to protect themselves.
The lamprey is not a fish at all, only a wicked imitation of one which can deceive nobody. But there are fishes which are unquestionably fish—fish from gills to tail, from head to fin, and of these the little sunfish may stand first. He comes up the brook in the spring, fresh as "coin just from the mint," finny arms and legs wide spread, his gills moving, his mouth opening and shutting rhythmically, his tail wide spread, and ready for any sudden motion for which his erratic little brain may give the order. The scalesof the sunfish shine with all sorts of scarlet, blue, green, purple, and golden colors. There is a black spot on his head which looks like an ear, and sometimes grows out in a long black flap, which makes the imitation still closer. There are many species of the sunfish, and there may be a half dozen of them in the same brook, but that makes no difference; for our purposes they are all as one. They lie poised in the water, with all fins spread, strutting like turkey-cocks, snapping at worms and little crustaceans and insects whose only business in the brook is that the fishes may eat them. When the time comes, the sunfish makes its nest in the fine gravel, building it with some care—for a fish. When the female has laid her eggs the male stands guard till the eggs are hatched. His sharp teeth and snappish ways, and the bigness of his appearance when the fins are all displayed, keep the little fishes away. Sometimes, in his zeal, he snaps at a hook baited with a worm. He then makes a fierce fight, and the boy who holds the rod is sure that he has a real fish this time. But when the sunfish is out of the water, strung on a willow rod, and dried in the sun, the boy sees that a very little fish can make a good deal of a fuss.
When the sunfish goes, then the catfish will follow—"a reckless, bullying set of rangers, with ever a lance at rest." The catfish belongs to an ancient type not yet fully made into a fish, and hence those whose paired fins are all properly fastened to the head, as his are not, hold him in well-merited scorn. He has no scales and no bright colors. His fins are small, and his head and mouth are large. Around his mouth are eight long "smellers," fleshy feelers, that he pushes out as he crawls along the bottom in search of anything that he may eat. As he may eat anything, he always finds it. His appetite is as impartial as that of a goat. Anything from a dead lamprey or a bunch of sunfish eggs to a piece of tomato can is grateful to him. In each of the fins which represent his arms is a long, sharp bone with a slimy surface and a serrated edge. These are fastened by a ball-and-socket joint, and whenever the fish is alarmed the bone is whirled over and set in place; then it sticks out stiffly on each side. There is another such bone in the fin on the back, and when all of these are set there is no fish that can swallow him. When he takes the hook, which he surely will do if there is any hook to be taken, he will swallow it greedily. As he is drawn out of the water he sets his three spines, and laughs to himself as the boy pricks his fingers trying to get the hook from his stomach. This the boy is sure to do, and because the boy of the Mississippi Valley is always fishing for catfish is the reason why his fingers are always sore. The catfish is careless of the present, and sure of the future. After he is strung on a birch branch and dried in the sunand sprinkled with dust and has had his stomach dug out to recover the hook, if he falls into the brook he will swim away. He holds no malice, and is ready to bite again at the first thing in sight.
The catfish uses his lungs as an organ of hearing. The needless lung becomes a closed sac filled with air, and commonly known as the swim bladder. In the catfish (as in the suckers, chubs, and most brook fishes) the air bladder is large, and is connected by a slender tube, the remains of the trachea, to the œsophagus. At its front it fits closely to the vertebral column. The anterior vertebræ are much enlarged, twisted together, and through them passes a chain of bones which connect with the hidden cavity of the air. The air bladder therefore assists the ear of the catfish as the tympanum and its bones assist the ear of the higher animals. An ear of this sort can carry little range of variety in sound. It probably gives only the impression of jars or disturbances in the water.
The catfish lays her eggs on the bottom of the brook, without much care as to their location. She is not, however, indifferent to their fate, for when the little fishes are hatched she swims with them into shallow waters, brooding over them and watching them much as a hen does with her chickens. In shallow ponds the young catfishes make a black cloud along the shores, and the other fishes let them alone, for their spines are sharp as needles.
Up the brooks in the spring come the suckers, large and small—coarse, harmless, stupid fishes, who have only two instincts, the one to press to the head of the stream to lay their eggs, the other to nose over the bottom of the stream wherever they go, sucking into their puckered, toothless mouths every organic thing, from water moss to carrion, which they may happen to find. They have no other habits to speak of, and when they have laid their eggs in a sandy ripple they care no more for them, but let go of life's activity and drop down the current to the river whence they came. There are black suckers and white suckers, yellow ones, brown ones, and mottled, and there is more than one kind in every little brook, but one and all they are harmless dolts, the prey of all larger fishes, and so full of bones that even the small boy spits them out after he has cooked them.
Then come the minnows, of all forms and sizes, the female dull colored and practical, laying her eggs automatically when she finds quiet water, and thinking no more of them afterward. The male, feeble of muscle, but resplendent in color, with head and fins painted scarlet or purple, or silver white, or inky black, as may be most pleasing to his spouse. His mouth is small and without teeth, for he feeds on creatures smaller than fishes, and his head in the spring is covered with coarse warts, nuptial ornaments, which fall off assoon as the eggs are properly disposed of. In the little brook which comes to my mind as I write two kinds of minnows come up the stream together before the others realize that it is verily spring. The one is small, dainty, translucent, and active, swimming free in the water near the surface and able to take care of itself when pursued by a sunfish or bass. Along the side of its body are two black stripes not quite parallel, and between and below them the silvery scales are flushed with fiery scarlet. The fins are all yellow, with scarlet at base, and as the male passes and repasses before the female all these colors, which she has not, grow brighter than ever.
The next is a larger fish, clumsy in form, hugging the bottom as he swims. The whole body of the male is covered with coarse white warts, and across each fin is a bar of black, white, and orange. This minnow feeds on mud, or rather on the little plants which grow in mud, and his intestines are lengthened out proportionally. In fact, they are so long that, to find room for them, they are wound spool-fashion about the air bladder in a way which happens to no other animal.
Of the other minnows, the one attracts his female by a big, jet-black head; another by the painted fins, which shine like white satin; another by his deep-blue sheen, which is washed all over with crimson. In fact, every conceivable arrangement of bright colors can be found, if we go the country over, as the adornment of some minnow when he mates in the spring. The only exception is green, for to the fishes, as to the birds, green is not a color. It only serves to cover one, while the purpose of real color is to be seen.
And there are fishes whose colors are so placed that they are hidden from above or below, but seen of their own kind which looks on them from the side.
The brightest fishes in the world, the "Johnny darters," are in our little brook. But if you look at them from above you will hardly see them, for they are dull olive on the back, with dark spots and dashes like the weeds under which they lie. The male is only a little fellow, not so long as your finger and slim for his size. He lies flat on the bottom, half hidden by a stone, around which his tail is twisted. He will stay there for hours, unseen by other fishes, except by his own kinsmen. But if you reach down to touch him with your finger he is no longer there. The tail straightens out, there is a flash of blue and scarlet, and a foot or two away he is resting quietly as before. On the bottom is his place, and he seems always at peace, but when he moves his actions are instantaneous and as swift as possible to a creature who lives in the water. On the bottom, among the stones, the female casts her spawn. Neither she nor the male pays any further attention to it, but inthe breeding season the male is painted in colors as beautiful as those of the wood warblers. When you go to the brook in the spring you will find him there, and if you catch him and turn him over on his side you will see the colors that he shows to his mate, and which her choice through ages has tended to develop in him. But do not hurt him. He can only breathe for a moment out of water. Put him back in the brook and let him paint its bottom the colors of a rainbow, a sunset, or a garden of roses. All that can be done with blue, crimson, and green pigments in fish ornamentation you will find in some brook in which the darters live. It is in the limestone brooks that flow into the Tennessee and Cumberland where they are found at their brightest, but the Ozark region comes in for a close second.
There will be sticklebacks in your brook, but the other fishes do not like them, for they are tough and dry of flesh, and their sharp spines make them hard to swallow and harder still to digest. They hide beneath the overhanging tufts of grass, and dart out swiftly at whatever passes by. They tear the fins of the minnows, rob the nests of the sunfish, drag out the eggs of the suckers, and are busy from morn to night at whatever mischief is possible in the brook.
The male dresses in jet-black when the breeding season is on, sometimes with a further ornament of copper-red or of scarlet. The sticklebacks build nests in which to hide their eggs, and over these the male stands guard, defending them with courage which would be dauntless in any animal more than two inches long. Very often he has to repel the attacks of the female herself, who, being relieved of all responsibility for her offspring, is prone to turn cannibal. Even the little dwellers of the brook have their own troubles and adversities and perversities.
Last of all comes the blob, or miller's thumb, who hides in darkness and picks up all that there is left. He is scaleless and slippery, large of head, plump of body, and with no end of appetite. He lurks under stones when the water is cold. He is gray and greenish, like the bottom in color. He robs the buried nests of eggs, swallows the young fishes, devours the dead ones, and checks the undue increase of all, not forgetting his own kind. When he has done his work and the fall has come and gone, and the winter and the spring return, the brook once more fills with fishes, and there are the same kinds, with the same actions, the same ways, and the same numbers, and one might think from year to year, as the sun is said to do, that these were the selfsame waters and the selfsame fishes mating over and over again and feeding on the selfsame food.
But this is not so. The old stage remains, or seems to remain,but every year come new actors, and the lines which they repeat were "written for them centuries before they were born." But each generation which passes changes their lives just a little, just as the brook and the meadow itself is changing.
By FRED MATHER.
The dolphin family (Delphinidæ) contains nine genera, with only one species in each, but the most interesting one is the white whale (Delphinapterus leucasof Pallas, orD. catodon[Linn.] of Gill), because it is the only one that can be kept in confinement and its habits observed under semi-domestication. It has fallen to my lot to care for several of these animals in confinement, and to have a chance to note their peculiarities.
"The Great New York Aquarium," at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, New York city, was built by Messrs. Coup and Reiche, and opened in 1876. Mr. Butler was the superintendent. I supervised fish culture, and when not otherwise engaged made collections of fishes and invertebrates in Bermuda and in other parts. In 1877 I had charge of their branch aquarium at Coney Island. At both places we had many white whales at different times, for the management would keep whales penned up on the St. Lawrence River to replace those which died, and would never show more than two at a time, claiming that they were rare animals and only to be had at "enormous" expense. The aquarium was a private concern; admission fifty cents; and as the owners were W. C. Coup, a former circus proprietor and once the business manager of Barnum's Circus, and Henry Reiche, an animal dealer, who would sell you giraffes, elephants, or white mice, the attractions were duly exaggerated by the press agent, no matter what the facts might be. This is why we kept a reserve stock of white whales. It would never do to have the public know that they were common during the summer in the St. Lawrence, and when one was getting weak another would be sent down, and the public supposed that the same pair was on exhibition all the time.
This species is common in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. According to the late Prof. G. Brown Goode, "stragglers have been seen in the Frith of Forth, latitude 56°, while on the American coast several have been taken within the past decade [1880] on the north shore of Cape Cod. They are slightly abundant in New England waters, but in the St. Lawrence River and on thecoast of Labrador are plentiful, and the object of a profitable fishery. They abound in the Bering and Okhotsk Seas, and ascend the Yukon River, Alaska, to a distance of seven hundred miles. The names in use are beluga and whitefish among whalers, porpoise, dauphin blanc, marsouin or marsoon in Canada, and keela luak with the Greenland Eskimos" (Fisheries Industries).
The white whale grows to be sixteen feet long; we never had one over ten feet in length, but they were billed, showman fashion, to be much longer. An adult will yield from eighty to one hundred gallons of good whale oil, besides several gallons of more valuable oil from the head which is used on clocks and watches under the trade name of "porpoise-jaw oil," which is sent in a crude state to manufacturers on Cape Cod, who refine it and free it from all tendency to gum. The skins make a leather that is waterproof and stands more hard service than any other known leather. Large quantities of it are sent to England and made into "porpoise-hide boots" for sportsmen, and in Canada the hides are converted into mail bags. The flesh is eaten to some extent by the fishermen, fresh, salted, and smoked.
Zach. Coup said: "I have eaten the fresh steaks several times, and found the meat a fair substitute for beef when the choice was between fish and bacon as a continuous diet, down on the islands where these three things were the only possible variation in the line of animal food, and a very limited choice in the vegetable line, comprising dried beans and rice, for when I was with them there was a scarcity of potatoes for seed, and canned goods had not attained their present popularity, even if these poor fishermen had been able to buy them."
The fat, oily blubber is an overcoat, a nonconductor of heat, and is between the muscle and the skin, as is largely the case with the hog, and, like the latter animal, there is savory muscle which may be cut into succulent steaks below it.
At first the white whales were not in my care, but, being strange animals, were watched with curiosity. The whale tank was as nearly circular as a twenty-sided tank could be whose glass plates were four feet wide with iron standards between, making a pool of about thirty feet in diameter. The pool was of cement and tapered down to an outlet about three feet below the floor, for drainage, and on the floor the cement basin arose two and a half feet, while the panes of one-inch glass were six feet high, with the water line two feet below the top of the glass. This gave the spectators a view of the animals below water, and of their backs as they came up to blow. The white whale and the harbor porpoise (Phocæna brachycion), known as the herring-hog, etc., do not make as much of a "spout"as the larger whales do; they roll up and exhale either less strongly or with less water over the blow-hole than their larger relatives. They merely send a mist into the air which can not be seen at a distance of a thousand yards, while the "blowing" of the larger whales may be seen for miles. Half a century ago we boys were taught by the text-books that the whale—there was only one mentioned—drew in water through its mouth, strained out the jellyfishes and other life, and then ejected the water, after the manner of a fire engine, through the top of its head. That this nostril, equipped with the best water-tight valve ever invented, enabled an air-breathing mammal to exhale and inhale, without getting much water into its lungs, we never suspected. If we thought about it at all we looked at the whale as a fish, having gills somewhere, and let it go at that. As our laws speak of "whale fisheries" and "seal fisheries" in connection with these great aquatic mammals, it would be just as correct to speak of all animals which frequent the water as "fishes," and legislate on the "muskrat fisheries," "mink fisheries," etc.; there is really no difference.
I have seen newspaper reports that about thirty years ago a white whale, brought there by a Mr. Cutting, lived in captivity in Boston for two years. Beyond the fact that one was brought there by a Mr. Cutting, and was on exhibition about that time, is all that I have been able to learn, and it is doubtful if it lived one year (see Fisheries Industries, section 1, page 19). One was exhibited at Barnum's old museum, at Broadway and Ann Street, New York, that is said to have lived nine months and was then burned up when that building burned, in March, 1868. As these animals only come into the St. Lawrence, where all live ones have been captured, in May and June, there is no reason to doubt that it did live in confinement for nine months, but none that have been exhibited since that time have survived more than half as long, and I have had personal knowledge of every one since Barnum's.
Coup's Broadway Aquarium opened on October 11, 1876—too late to get a white whale that year. But early next spring Mr. Coup sent his brother to the St. Lawrence River for specimens. This brother, "Zach.," had never seen a whale, but he had full instructions concerning their care from Professor Butler, who had charge of the one at Barnum's Museum. There was an air of mystery about the expedition, and in May "Zach." brought a solitary specimen and at once went for more. The town was billed, the daily press was worked in true circus fashion, the crowd came and expressed various opinions. Standing by the tank, I heard strange comments:
"Do you call that little thing a whale?" This to an attendant.
"Yes, sir, it's a white whale from the northern coast of Labrador, the only one ever captured or ever seen by the oldest whaleman. It was reported to have been seen near the entrance to Hudson Bay, and Mr. Coup fitted out an expedition and captured it at an expense of over one hundred thousand dollars." He had evidently been reading what the press agent had stuffed into the newspapers.
The visitor took another look and remarked: "The papers said it was twenty feet long; I should think it might be six feet, but no more."
"Well," answered the attendant, "water is mitey deceivin', an' that whale is more'n three times as long as it looks. The fact is, the papers did report it to be longer than it is, for when we drew off the water to clean the tank yesterday we put a steel tape over the whale and it measured just nineteen feet eleven inches and a half."
Then a rural couple came, and she remarked: "Oh, I'm so glad we came here, and can tell the folks that we've seen a real live whale!"
"Lucy," said he, "this city is full of all kinds of cheats, an' I don't believe that thing is alive more'n Methuselah is; it's some indy-rubber contraption with clockwork in it that makes it go round and puff in that way."
After the season for hatching trout and salmon was over, in April, I was detailed to build a branch aquarium at Coney Island, with instructions to construct a whale tank the first thing, in order to be ready for the next arrivals. I employed a maker of beer vats, and he brought three-inch planks for the bottom, staves eight feet high, and iron for hoops. The tank was to be twenty-five feet in diameter, with a "chime" nine inches below the bottom, making the tank seven feet deep inside. It was to set with its top eighteen inches above the soil, which was to be the water line, giving the whales five feet and a half of water—little enough when we realize that a ten-foot animal has a diameter of nearly three feet. Heavy timbers were laid under the bottom of the tank, carefully leveled, for no weight can be borne by the staves in a tank of that size.
All this was planned, as well as the engine and pumps, and was well under way, when I received an order from Mr. Coup to go to Quebec and bring down two whales while Zach. went for more. Then I learned the secrets of the live white whale trade. The first whale had been kept back until it could be delivered at night, and its transportation was a mystery intended to arouse the curiosity of the public.
At the railroad station at Quebec two boxes were turned over to me. They were about fifteen feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep. They were upholstered with "bladder wrack," a mostsoft cushion, and in each box a white whale lay on these pneumatic cushions. A plug in the bottom of each box had let the water out while the boxes were being lifted by the rope handles on the sides, but when on the cars the plugs were replaced and water to the depth of a foot was poured in; this served to keep the under parts moist, while frequent sponging or the use of a dipper served to keep the skin from drying. The nostril, or "blow-hole," needed the most attention, for it has a valve which must not be allowed to get even partially dry, and a saturated sponge was kept suspended over this all the time during the journey by rail to New York.
The white whale is a very timid animal, and comes up the St. Lawrence in May and June, when the young are brought forth; it is believed that they then go to the river to avoid their enemies, among which is the "killer" or orca whale. Their food, according to Professor Goode, is "bottom fish, like flounders and halibut, cod, haddock, salmon, squids, and prawns." From my knowledge of this whale in confinement I am surprised at the above list, for those under my observation not only preferred live eels, but could not swallow one whose diameter was over one inch, and it was difficult to get quantities of eels as small as three quarters of an inch in diameter, especially when an adult whale would consume about twenty pounds in a day. When larger eels were placed in the tank they would be taken out dead in a day or two with their sides scratched and torn by the small teeth of the whale which had failed to swallow it. We tried other food, for eels are quite expensive in New York city, costing fifteen and eighteen cents per pound, but the whales refused small flatfish, flounders, etc., and the only other food they ate was small tomcods. They refused dead herrings and all fish that were cut in pieces.
The animals are captured at the small French fishing village of Rivière l'Ouelle, on Isle aux Coudres, seventy miles below Quebec, where life is as primitive as it was two hundred years ago in this, one of the oldest of Canadian settlements. Luke Tilden, one of our aquarium men, who went up with Zach. Coup, told of the capture of the whales, and the following is from notes taken by me as Luke told it: The men all fish and the women do a little gardening, but their harvest is the marsouin, a name common to the white whale and to the black porpoise. A fair white whale will weight eight hundred pounds and yield nearly one hundred gallons of oil worth fifty cents per gallon, so that when they trap twenty in a season it means prosperity to the colony; in 1874 they took one hundred, but the catch has fallen off since. "When we reached the island," said Luke, "we went straight to Father Alixe Pelletier and donated ten dollars to the Church for prayers for our success, and it was well invested.The good old man is the head of that colony and keeps everything straight. In 1863 there was an epidemic of indifference to the Church, and the men went to the bad, got drunk, fought, fished on Sundays, and reviled the priest, withholding all dues to him. Then he said, 'God is angry with you, and to punish you will send no more marsouin until you repent.' They laughed at him, and for three years no marsouin came to them, and they were very poor. They went to the father on a Christmas day and implored him to intercede for them, and he did. The next spring there was a great catch of marsouin, and the men have remained faithful since.
"The tides here rise and fall some twenty feet, and the whales are trapped in an inclosure made of poles, the entrance to which is closed when a school enters. The pound is about a mile square, and is made of slim poles put two feet apart, space enough to let a whale through, but they will not attempt it. The tide falls and leaves them on the mud, quaking with fear. When we want live ones the boxes are made, padded with seaweed, shoved out over the mud, tipped on one side, and the whale rolled into it, where its struggles soon put it on an even keel, and then it gives up and does nothing but breathe as the boxes are taken on board a schooner for Quebec."
I was fortunate in getting the above story from Luke Tilden, for a few weeks afterward he died in the aquarium; and Zach. Coup would tell nothing that could be relied on, not even to the locality where the whales were caught.
The white whale is the only one of its tribe that can be captured in the manner related, because of its cowardly timidity. The harbor porpoise, or "herring-hog," would jump nets and break barricades or die. It would not bear the confinement of an aquarium, for it would leap out of the tanks or dash its brains out in trying to do so; but, once placed in a tank of either salt or fresh water, the white whale starts to circle it, always to the left, with the sun, and contentedly blows at intervals of from five to fifteen minutes, and seems as contented as a canary bird in its cage.
The whale does not always swim in circles to the left when free, and why it does so in confinement is a question. I merely assert the fact. Perhaps wiser men know why perfectly still water in a washbowl will rotate to the left with an accelerated motion when the plug is withdrawn, but I do not. As the motion to the left is invariable there must be a rule for it, but, granting that this motion has some relation to the motion of the earth, the question of how this affects the voluntary movements of an animal remains to be answered. I have watched over a dozen white whales in captivity, dumped into tanks from the most convenient side without regard to the direction of their heads, and every one turned and circled to the left. Thequestion arises, Why do they do this? At the new aquarium now at Battery Park, New York city, the big sturgeon always circles to the left except when feeding.
The two whales at Coney Island were good-sized ones, nearly ten feet long, and they raced around, side by side, and played for nearly two hours before they began to take the eels which had been in the tank several days, although the large mammals had been without food for at least seven days. On the way down I had noticed a difference in the sound of their breathing, that of the female being sharp and clear, while her mate seemed to have a hoarseness, and occasionally gave something like a cough. I called attention to this and told Mr. Coup that the animal had some lung trouble. He consulted a man who professed to know about these animals, and then reported his opinion that the cough was nothing to fear, "merely a little water in the blow-hole."
"This may be true," I replied; "I'm not a medical man, but I've heard many consumptives cough, and that whale imitates them. I doubt if it lives a month."
It lived just twenty-six days after its arrival at Coney Island. The last five days of its life it took no food, and its labored breathing was annoying to all who knew the cause of it. Then came a touching display of affection. The female slackened her pace day by day to accommodate it to that of her constantly weakening companion, and as the end neared she put her broad transverse tail under his and propelled him along. He stopped breathing at 10A. M., but his mate kept up her efforts, occasionally making a swift run around the tank, as if to say, "Come, follow me," and then slowing up at his side, resumed the work of sculling him along, as before. Rude men expressed pity for the living one, and after my men had rigged a derrick and hoisted her mate from the pool she would rise higher out of water when she came up to blow, remembering that he had gone out over the top of the tank. An autopsy by local physicians, whose names have been forgotten, assisted by a medical student then in my employ, now Dr. J. R. Latham, 126 West Eleventh Street, New York city, disclosed the fact that the whale died of pneumonia.
A white whale which reached the Broadway aquarium about July 1st, after mine came, lived seven months, dying January 28, 1878. My whale was either diseased when captured or took a cold at Isle aux Coudres. The New York one was sound all summer, and I told Mr. Coup that it might live for years, but the artificial heat of the aquarium in winter was not what a subarctic animal could endure, and it succumbed as most of Peary's Eskimos did in New York last winter. The autopsy on this whale was performed by Dr. F. D. Weisse, professor of practical and surgical anatomy of themedical department of the University of the City of New York, assisted by Prof. J. W. I. Arnold, of the same university, and Dr. Liautard, superintendent of the Veterinary College. They agreed that pneumonia was the cause of death, induced by a change of temperature of the water in which the animal had been kept. The official measurements of this female specimen, whose organs were kept in the two institutions named, were: nine feet six inches from snout to tail tips; three feet between tips of caudal fins, with a body breadth of twenty inches and a head breadth of thirteen inches. The lungs, weighing twenty-two pounds, presented on dissection the appearance of having been affected with chronic catarrhal pneumonia. The liver weighed nineteen pounds. The four stomachs were all free from any trace of previous disease.
In looking up the life history of the white whale when opportunity offered, during the last twenty years I have consulted many old whalemen, and they all say that whales of all kinds take their babies on their flukes and scull them along as my female sculled her dying and dead partner. This must be a fact, for the little one could never swim with its parent. But another question arises: Is this purely a female instinct to provide for its young, which was, in the case of my pair, developed into a desire to preserve a companion? or, in other words, would a male have done this, or would a female have done it if she were free and had other companions? Was it love for her mate, or a feeling of selfishness at her lonely position? My female was afterward sent to England in the old transportation box, and was nine days without food, for they will not swallow food in transit, and it lived four days in London, clearing more than enough to pay for the animal and all expenses.
When the free aquarium at Battery Park, New York city, was opened, December 10, 1896, there was talk of getting white whales the next spring, but there was no way to employ men to go for them at a stated salary, as they would have to pass a civil-service examination and become regularly appointed employees of the city. In this emergency Mr. Eugene G. Blackford came forward and advanced the money for the expedition, and it started early in May. On June 4th Professor Butler delivered a pair of them to the superintendent, Dr. Bean. I was aware of their coming, and was at the aquarium, and so was Dr. Latham. The male was lead-colored, was said to be a year and a half old, and was nine feet long. The female was of the usual cream-color, ten feet and a half long, and was said to be a year older than her mate. It is known that young and immature specimens are darker than adults, but I am skeptical about the ages, especially as there is a half year credited to each at the exact time the young are brought forth, and do notknow on what the ages are based further than that the young are darker in color for a time.
"How does the breathing of the big one sound to you?" the doctor asked.
"Like ours at Coney Island that died from lung trouble," I replied, "and I would not have brought that animal down unless it was the only one to be had during the season."
"I think I'll give her about ten days to live," replied the doctor.
As these were not my whales, I declined to talk of their prospects of life to several reporters who knew me, and the whale in question died of pneumonia on June 11th, just a week after its arrival in New York, and several days before the trained ear of Dr. Latham had allotted its span of life.
The male came to its death by an accident at 9P. M.on June 24th, just twenty days after arrival. An eel got into its blow-hole and it drowned. According to an account published in the New York Sun of Monday, July 26, 1897, said to be obtained from Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, director of the aquarium, the whale "was as healthy a one as ever spouted until late on Friday afternoon, the 24th, when one of the keepers noticed that something was wrong. His attention was attracted by the loud wheezing that accompanied each blow that the whale made when he came up for air. The wheezing could be heard all over the aquarium. Dr. Bean was sent for. He was certain that the whale's lungs were all right. He cited a fact, known to the custodian and to all the keepers, that the mammal for the past month had remained under water a little longer after he came to the surface to blow. This convinced Dr. Bean that the whale's lungs were sound and that some other cause of illness must be found."
Then the whale coughed out a piece of an eel that it had bit in two, and as it came up to blow again there was another piece hanging from the blow-hole which could not shut, and so let water into the lungs. Dr. Bean ordered the water drawn off the tank in order to get at the animal, but a former superintendent, who had planned the tanks, had put in such small drainage pipes that by the time the water was drawn down so that the men could get at the whale it was dead.
I do not believe that a white whale lived two years in Boston, because this subarctic animal could not endure the extremes of Boston's temperatures without contracting lung disease in some form. Think of such an animal living through climatic conditions that an Eskimo can not stand, and in a public institution where thousands of people are vitiating the air!
Animals which live wholly in water are more susceptible tochanges of temperature than those which live on land. The white whale can be kept the year round in New York city if it can have a refrigerating plant to give it the temperature which it needs, and proper food.
We bring polar bears to New York which suffer in summer, if not in our comparatively mild winters, and tropical animals which barely survive, but these land mammals are not so susceptible to climatic influences as are the fishes and the purely aquatic mammals, like the whales. These can never be kept long by the crude means which have been employed. From the purest air they have been changed to the more or less vitiated air where thousands of human beings are crowded and in a temperature which is unnatural. If we would keep them we must give them better chances for living than in open tanks in the summer temperature of New York.
By BYRON D. HALSTED.
The unexpected is apt to occur. Along with the regularity in living things, which we call "uniformity of Nature," there is so strong a tendency to vary that one almost expects to find a turn in the avenues of life sooner or later, and that gradual or sudden, as the case may be. We will not stop to discuss the open question of whether we are possessed by an inherent quality of variation, or as creatures of circumstances, subject to the controlling forces of our environment.
Yesterday while looking at a row of seedling peaches, all from the same lot of pits, one of the miniature trees was found to be bronze or copper colored throughout. This set me to thinking. Here was a "sport," as it is termed, and if I take good care of the abnormity, bud it into common stock, etc., the landscape architects and ornamental gardeners may thank me for the novelty that will please their wealthy patrons.
Leaving aside the abnormal as met with in the animal world, for much of it is more painful than otherwise to contemplate, let us glance at some of the unusual things occurring among plants.
One first thinks of some strange forms in leaf, and if the eyes are opened to them they may be met with upon every hand. The "four-leaf" clover is lucky perhaps only because the finder is sharper-eyed than others, and stands a brighter chance of seeing success as it crouches almost invisible in the wild grass, the tilled field, or wherever the eyes may be set to find it.
The child who brings me the oddities of vegetable forms is knowing in the normals of his class of curiosities, or else he would not see the novelties from the finding and exhibiting of which he gains so much pleasure. The person who is familiar with the striking beauty of the cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is the one who rejoices at the variations that may occur in the tints of the bright corolla. His delight would reach a high pitch should the conspicuous spikes be found upon dry ground, and not by the bank of some stream half hidden by the overhanging grass. But should the wandering plant display white flowers, then an albino of a most interesting kind has been met with, and some reason for it is sought in the unusual locality. Only a few days ago a white variation of theLobelia syphilitica, cousin to the cardinal, was seen by the writer treasured in the Botanical Garden at Cambridge, Mass., and it called to mind the rage for pink water lilies, that twenty years ago were only met with wild in ponds at Plymouth, Mass. I asked an expert recently if there was any call for the pink or "Plymouth" lilies, and he informed me that the fad had died out with the transplanting and widespread culture of the pink "sports" of the nymphæa ponds.
Abnormal colors in flowers are among the most common freaks in wild plants, and none are more frequent than the albinos. One could fill a page with instances of this sort. Some of our most common weeds, as the moth mullein (Verbascum blattaria), have a large percentage of the plants with white blossoms, and the patches of the white interspersed with the normal yellow-flowered plants in poorly kept meadows and neglected land has led the writer to gather seed of each to test the truth of the opinion that the white strain may be transmitted to the offspring, but the proof is not yet at hand.
The writer knows where there is a patch of the hound's tongue (Echinospermum) with a good sprinkling of plants producing white corollas instead of the normal deep maroon. The two colors make a good subject for students who are gaining an elementary knowledge of the stability of species, and the range of striking variations that must be allowed for them.
Next to the albinos the instances where the floral parts approach leaves in size and color are the most common. A few weeks ago while passing through a field once devoted to corn, but now overgrown with weeds, and therefore of special interest to a botanist, my eyes fell upon a daisy plant all the heads of which were with olive-green ray flowers instead of the ordinary pure white ones. These rays were smaller than the normal and quite inclined to roll, as shown in Fig. 1, and form quills, as seen in some of the fancy chrysanthemums. By the way, our common field daisy is a genuine chrysanthemum, and that which is produced in one species underthe guiding, fostering hand of the skilled gardener was here shadowed forth in the field of waste land.