BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER II. (_Right Whale_).—In one respect this is

the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly

hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or

baleen; and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article

in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by

all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black

Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a

deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus

multitudinously baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in

the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the

English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the

Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the

Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been

hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale

which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on

the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of

the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.

Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the

English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree

in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single

determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by

endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that

some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.

The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with

reference to elucidating the sperm whale.