Sperm Whale. Marco Polo took much the same view, but suggested that the Whale did not deliberately attack the ship, but was deceived by the foam following in its wake into thinking "there is something to eat afloat, and makes a rush forward, whereby it shall often stave in some part of the ship."[1]
Sir W. Flower and many others are of opinion that there is but one species of Cachalot. But many names have been given to supposed other forms. The genus itself has even been divided, and to a set of vertebrae from the south Dr. Gray gave the perfectly superfluous name of Meganeuron kreffti. The "High-finned Cachalot" rests mainly upon the suggestions of Sir Robert Sibbald. It is supposed to have a high dorsal fin, and teeth in the upper as well as in the lower jaw. Common though it was asserted by its describer to be, there is not a bone, not a fragment even of a bone, alleged to belong to Physeter tursio in any museum in the world! It seems premature, therefore, to include this mysterious creature in any list of Cetacea, though that was done by no less a naturalist than the late Mr. Thomas Bell. It is this creature round which most of the stories of ferocity congregate. It is held to be the monster from which Perseus delivered Andromeda, and which was about to devour Angelica upon the shore of Brittany. The fact of the matter is, that the Sperm Whale, like so very many other Whales, is world-wide in range; and those naturalists who did not believe in so wide a distribution found themselves obliged, in order to satisfy their own views, to create new species for those of distant localities. Hence the dozen or so of synonyms which refer to what is to be called Physeter macrocephalus.
The genus Kogia (sometimes written Cogia), the so-called "Pygmy Sperm Whale," is a southern form of much smaller dimensions than its gigantic ally just described. Kogia does not exceed 15 feet or so in length. It differs from Physeter also in the well-marked and falcate dorsal fin, in its generally delphinoid form, in the short snout, and the more normal (for a Whale) shape of the blow-hole, which is crescentic.
There are also a number of osteological characters in which the two Physeterines differ from each other. In Kogia all the cervical vertebrae are ankylosed together; the skull is short, though equally asymmetrical; the ribs are as many as twelve or
- ↑ Yule, Travels of Marco Polo, ii. London, 1874, p. 231.
