and sent out her boats in pursuit, and then the rivalry reaches its climax. In the bow sits the harpooner, with his weapon ready, and the line, about one hundred fathoms long, coiled up in a tub beside him. When the boat comes close to the whale, he stands up with two or three coils of the line in one hand, and with the other plunges the harpoon with all his might into the most vital part he can reach. At the same time he gives the word Stern all;' and the crew instantly back the boat, to escape the dangerous movement of the whale as it plunges below the surface. It usually dives downward, and, if the harpoon holds fast, the line is run out with such velocity that water must be poured upon it, to prevent the side of the boat from taking fire. The fact of the harpoon 'griping' is announced by hoisting a flag; and the other boats hasten up to assist, and to furnish, if need be, additional line. Two lengths of line are frequently required; and a fish has been known to run out ten lines. As soon as the animal comes again to the surface to breathe, which is usually in from twenty to sixty minutes, additional harpoons are thrust into it, and each additional boat hoists its signal as it gets fast. Again the fish sinks in the water, or darts away rapidly to a great distance, pulling sometimes the boats along behind it. When it becomes exhausted, endeavours are made to thrust lances into it, which, however, has to be done with caution, as a stroke with the tail or fin of the whale is sufficient to stave in the boat. A whalehunt often fails; the harpoon may not keep its hold, or the line may get foul, and have to be cut; or the line of the first boat may run out before the second boat comes up to help it. When such mischances occur, the lowering of the flag tells the unwelcome news to the captain, who has been watching the efforts of his crew with the greatest possible anxiety. An hour and a half on an average suffices to kill a fish, though it sometimes takes twice as long. When harpooned or lanced in a vital part, it sometimes dies suddenly and quietly; but oftener it dies hard, lashing the water with its tail into bloody foam with a noise that may be heard miles off.

When dead, the whale is towed to the ship-no easy matter when the distance is great-and made fast to the side. The blubber is cut off with cutting-spades in broad strips of twenty or thirty feet long, and hoisted on deck by tackle, the body being turned over until the whole is stripped. In the meantime others have removed the whalebone from the mouth. This done, the carcass is cast off, a prey to sharks, bears, and vultures. The blubber being cut into smaller pieces, and having the outer skin peeled off, is stowed away in casks or tanks.

The process of fishing the sperm whale is not much different from that just described, but it is attended with rather more danger. The cacholot has a tail as formidable as that of the right whale, while, in addition, it can stave in the side of a ship with its snout, or crush a boat in its mouth. Its speed and endurance in running

are also greater, and it can continue longer under water. When secured, however, it is a more valuable prize. Sperm-oil, of which a large fish will yield eighty barrels, is purer than the oil of the right whale, and brings a higher price; the spermaceti contained in the head is also valuable. In the intestines, too, there are sometimes found large masses of ambergris, which brings a high price, as much as forty shillings an ounce. When a sperm whale is brought alongside, besides cutting off the blubber, the spermaceti has to be taken out of the head, which is done by lowering buckets into the cavern and scooping out the half-liquid mass. Instead of bringing home the blubber itself, it is boiled down at once; this is called 'trying-out' the oil, and is a very dirty business. The cracknels— that is, the cellular tissue out of which the oil has been squeezed—are used as fuel to heat the pots; and to avoid the smoke and soot in the ship, this operation is performed on shore, wherever it is possible. The blubber of the right whale is sometimes boiled down at sea, when the voyage is long or there is a scarcity of stowage.

In the year 1868, the United States had a whaling-fleet of 338 ships, of which 133 came into port that year, bringing 48,000 barrels of sperm-oil, 68,000 barrels of whale-oil, and 870,000 pounds of whalebone. In the Okhotsk Sea, the average catch in 1867, for the eight vessels engaged there, was 644 barrels. A tun of oil, it may be stated, is 258 gallons. The American barrels are not of any regular size; at one time they were called lagers, which were of the size of about half a tun; now their barrels are much smaller, and are called drums; but there is no standard. The prices of the two kinds of oil vary according to the supply; sperm-oil is always dearest. 'Whale-oil,' as the produce of the Greenland whale is called, is only about a third of the price of sperm-oil; the one may be three shillings per gallon, while the other is eight shillings and sixpence. About two thousand tuns of whale and seal oil are used every year in Dundee in the jute manufacture; and as the price may be averaged at about £40 per tun, a large sum of money is involved. It may be stated here, as one of the curiosities of the whaling trade, that about the beginning of the crinoline mania, whalebone was sold as high as £500 per ton! The old law that treats of the whale as a royal fish, assigns the tail as a perquisite to the queen, in order to furnish her Majesty's wardrobe with whalebone! We may judge from this how much was then known of this branch of natural history.

THE SEAL-FISHERY.

The capture of the seal divides the attention of the northern whalers with that of the whale itself; and some voyages are undertaken for the seal alone. It is valuable both for its oil and its skin. The oil, being nearly colourless and inodorous, is preferred to whale-oil.

The seal is not a cetacean; it belongs to a distinct family of

marine mammalia called the Phocida, in which the transition is seen from the usual mammalian structure to the more marked fish form

of the whale group. Seals live chiefly in water, but spend part of their time on shore, basking on rocks, beaches, or ice-fields; and they usually bring forth their young on the ice. They are carnivorous animals, living chiefly on fishes. The common seal on the British coasts shews a high appreciation of salmon-watching the salmon nets, and getting hold of the fish when entrapped. Seals are divided into several genera and species. The species that form the object of pursuit in the arctic fisheries are of the genus Phoca. The best known is the Common Seal (Phoca vitulina), which is from three

to five feet long. Other species are much larger, as the Harp Seal, which is from six to eight feet; and the Great or Bearded Seal, which reaches ten feet and more. The skin of the seal is covered with smooth hair; but in none of the northern species is it fine enough to be prized as fur. The fur-seals are all natives of the southern seas, and are so scarce that only a fraction of the sealskin. jackets for which ladies pay such prices are genuine; the greater part are made of dexterously manipulated beaver, rabbit, and other skins.

Many points in the natural history of seals are yet obscure. It is not well known, for instance, what species, or how many species, yield the valuable seal fur of the southern seas. At the meeting of the British Association at Dundee in 1867, it was brought out that the young seals killed in spring are mostly if not altogether males. One experienced master asserted that he had never been able to find a young female, although he had offered a reward to the man who should bring him one. The testimony of the surgeon of the ship was to the same effect. From this some infer that seals must breed twice a year. They produce one or two at a birth.

In

The seal-fishery begins early in April, at the 'pupping' season, when the seals are on the ice. We shall suppose a ship arriving at that time off the ice-fields, say near the island of Jan Mayen. The moment a herd of seals is discovered, the crew rush to the scene, and the butchery begins. As many of the old ones as possible are shot before they can escape into the water; the young ones fall a helpless prey, and are ruthlessly clubbed to death. The ice is sometimes covered with seals as far as the eye can reach; and a usual day's work of a ship's crew is to kill from five hundred to eight hundred old seals, along with two thousand young ones. the year 1866, one ship, the Camperdown, 'bagged' the astounding number of twenty-two thousand seals in nine days. To save useless labour, the seals are skinned on the ice; care being taken to bring off the blubber or fat, which is two to three inches thick, along with the skin. A seal sixteen days old will weigh, in its skin, from forty to fifty pounds; this may be divided into blubber, say thirty pounds; skin, six or eight pounds; and 'kran,' or carcass, ten or twelve pounds. Old seals weigh twice or thrice as much. The labour of dragging the skins to the ship, especially if at any distance, is serious; one old skin, or three young, is all that one man can drag at a time. When the skins are brought on board, the blubber is carefully pared off and put into casks or tanks, and the skins stowed away in the hold. The skins are used for a variety of purposes: some are cured with the hair on, and made into carriage rugs, hall mats, sealskin caps, &c. ; others are tanned into leather, and used by boot and shoe makers, coach-builders, upholsterers, &c.

PERILS OF THE WHALE-FISHERY.

The annals of the whale-fishery are full of disasters, sufferings, and hairbreadth escapes. Scarcely a year passes that we do not read of some ship having been frozen in, and the crew having had to make their way over the ice or by their boats until they fell in with another vessel, or perhaps having been obliged to winter in those inhospitable regions, but poorly provisioned and equipped. A still more frequent fate is for a ship, in making her way through a lane in the ice, to be crunched up like an egg-shell by the coming together of the floes. A few years ago the Princess Charlotte, a Dundee whaler, was so suddenly overtaken in this way, that the men had barely time to escape with their lives when she was reduced to a shapeless mass of splinters: everything was lost, even to the clothes of the crew. Some years are signalised by an unusual number of disasters. In 1830, Dundee lost two out of a very small fleet; and in 1835, of the twenty-three whalers sailing from Hull, no fewer than five were destroyed. The very element of destruction itself affords the means of escaping with life, often attended, however, with great peril and privation. A Dutch captain, named Bille,

in 1675, lost a richly-laden ship, almost in an instant, and the captain and crew sailed about in their boats for fourteen days before being rescued. Thirteen other ships were wrecked during the same year in the Spitzbergen seas. The powers of endurance often displayed, and the wonderful escapes often made, are well exemplified in the adventure of George Martin, mate of the Intrepid, in 1853. Martin was with a party at a considerable distance from the ship, and on the way back happened to be some way behind the rest. They, coming to a lane of water in the ice, made a detour to avoid it; and when Martin came up, he missed the track they had taken, and became completely bewildered. In this condition night came down upon him. He dared not think of rest or sleep, for the numbness of death would soon have stolen over him. Besides, bears were prowling about and trying to approach him. So he had to keep constantly moving and watching. The hope that, with daylight, he would get a sight of the ship, kept him from despair; but when morning came, there was no ship to be seen; and after wandering and looking for a long, long day, he found himself again in darkness, and among the bears. The second night was passed like the first, and the second morning brought still no sign of the ship. All the while there was nothing to eat but raw seal kran.' It was not till the third morning that a distant glimpse of the long-lookedfor ship gladdened his eyes. Wearied and worn-out, he at last reached it, to the amazement of his shipmates, who, after searching in vain for him in every direction, had concluded that he had fallen a prey to the bears or the cold.

A remarkable tale of the sufferings of a whaling crew, as narrated by the survivors, went the round of the newspapers in the spring of 1867, and thrilled the hearts of all readers. The Diana, a steamwhaler belonging to Hull, after the usual halt at Lerwick, sailed from that place for the whaling-ground on the 9th of May, with a crew of fifty men. From June to September the crew were busy at work, although not very successfully. In the beginning of the latter month, the Diana was beset with ice, but got free-only, however, to be again hemmed in, to the south of Coutt's Inlet. By the end of September, the crew were subsisting on half-allowance of provisions, and the helpless ship was drifting southwards in the solid ice-bed at the rate of ten miles a day. When off Exeter Sound, they hung a burning mass of tow and oil at the yard-arm, to attract attention, but the weather was so foggy that no one could see them. To add to their alarm, the vessel sustained some heavy ice-nips, and, as if to cap the misery of the crew, she also sprung a leak. An attempt was first made to live upon the ice in tents; but, after a brief trial, the cold made it necessary to return to the ship. Captain Gravell, the commander, died on the 26th of December, having previously given the crew instructions how to act. Gradually the fuel of the ship became used up; the spare wood that was stowed on board was burned; the