Page:The Catalpa Expedition (1897).djvu/107

lips, which at the bottom are four feet thick, tapering to a blunt edge, where they fit into a rebate sunk in the upper jaw. The throat is four feet, and is mainly blubber, interpenetrated by fibrous, muscular flesh. The lips and throat of a two-hundred-and-fifty-barrel whale should yield sixty barrels of oil, and, with the supporting jaw-bones, will weigh as much as twenty-five oxen of one thousand pounds each. Attached to the throat by a broad base is the enormous tongue, the size of which can be better conceived by the fact that twenty-five barrels of oil have been taken from one. Such a tongue would equal in weight ten oxen. The tail of such a whale is about twenty-five feet broad and six feet deep, and is considerably more forked than that of the spermaceti. The point of juncture with the body is about four feet in diameter, the vertebra about fifteen inches, the remainder of the small being packed with rope-like tendons from the size of a finger to that of a man's leg. The great rounded joint at the base of the skull gleams like an ivory sphere, nearly as large round as a carriage wheel. Through the greatest blood-vessels, more than a foot in diameter, surges, at each pulsation of a heart as large as a hogshead, a torrent of barrels of blood heated to one hundred and four degrees. The respiratory canal is over twelve inches in diameter, through which the rush of air is as noisy as the exhaust-pipe of a thousand-horse-power steam engine; and when the fatal wound is given, torrents of clotted blood are spattered into the air over the nauseated hunters. In