THE CETACEANS

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7848, 10 July 1911, Page 10

THE CETACEANS

The fish-like form of the cetaceans or whales Is the result of adaptation, and not of graduated development from a primary condition, as in the case of fishes which are able, by tbeir possession of gills, to extract the oxygen from air dissolved in water. Limbs .were never •possessed by fishes, fins being developed instead. Once upon a time, however, the whales did possess limbs, and the fore ones are still present in a nidi mentary state, having become "degenerated'” into mere flappers, which serve more for the purpose of balancing than of swimming, the propelling organ of a whale being, 'under all circumstances, its tail. Of the cetaceans the tail—the two flukes of which are often alternate in shape like the flanges of a screw, the one being convex upwards, the other couvex downwards —instead of being in a vertical position as it is in fishes, is horizontal, which position it has assumed in adaptation to the circumstance of the whale's liaving continually to rise to the surface for the pupose of the breathing of air directly, which, as it is a mammal aud net a fish, it cdhnot do without. "The first duty of a whale," observed Sir William Flower, "is to be large," and the “whalebone-whales" —one or other sort of -which is generally conjured up in the mind's-eyo at the thought of -a whale—do, it is true, fill an enormous space with their body, the largest of them occupying over more space than was taken up by any of the mammals known to have existed on land in pre-historic times. But the whale-bone-whales, which are so distinguished on account of tire "baleen" or *whalebone” which, in them, takes the place of teeth, by no means comprise ail the cetaceans, some of the smaller of which —those possessing teeth—make up in other ways for their comparative fail-: ure to fulfil their "first duty,” although even the smallest cetacean is not surpassed in size by many fishes. _ The common dolphin .(dolphinus delphis) is no doubt the most familiar of the emailcr, if not, indeed, of all the cetaceans, by reason of its having from earliest times been supposed, from the apparent pleasure which it displays in shoals when accompanying a vessel, that it possessed a natural friendship for man. Whilst the common dolphin, together with ail the other fish-like-formed mammals that live wholly in .the sea, was, until comparatively recent times, regarded as a fish, its unfishlike intelligence seems always to have attracted attention. By a natural-history writer of the latter end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, for distance, the dolphin is referred to as being culled "the brother of man, because he is in some degree like to men in his ways,” and nodoubt the many fabulous tales aud common superstitions which are included as fact in tiro ]rages of earlier works upon natural history were founded upon the recognition of its superior degree of intelligence as compared with the ordinary nsh.

As an instance of the credulity of earlier naturalists, dop-Thins* according to Bartholomeus—a translation of whose works was looked ui>on as a standard authority on the subject of natural history in the time of Shakespqare—-'‘know by the smell if a dead man that is on the ©eo, ato ever of dopl'hin's- kind; and if the dead man hath eaten thereof, he eafceth him anon, and if he did not, he keepeth and defendeth him from eating and biting of other fish, and sboveth him and bringeth him to the cliff with his bwn wroting"—rooting with the snout, as a pig doss. The early representations of the common dolphin are generally little more aiocuruato than axe meet of the stories related of it, but the earliest known portrayal of it, which exists up* on an archaic silver coin, iiroves to be a remarkably good likeness. Ono sees, too the dolphin frequently used as a motive in designs, especially ■where any suggestion of the sea is sought to be embodied. In classical mythology .dolphins are symbolically as drawing the car of the sea-goddess Amphitrite, and their alleged fondness for music is referred to in the myth relating to the poet and musician Anon, who was said to have thrown himself overboard to escape from the sailors, 'who coveted the presents that had been bestowed,

upon him, and been carried bo safety on the back of one of the song-loving dolphins that had assembled round the vessel to hear his playing. The common dolphin, which, when adult, measures from six to eight feet in length, inhabits practically all the seas of the temperate and tropical regions. In this country, where—though more odten in the south than in the north—it is sometimes taken in the nets, it goes gneral-ly by the name of "battle-nose," or "bottle-head,” the name “Uolphin” usually being given to the wonderfully coloured fish (coryphoena hippue) which to the Portuguese is known as the "dorado.”