This book deals with a natural history of Whales and Dolphins, aquatic mammals within the order of Cetacea.
The Whales form one of the most extraordinary groups of the Mammalia, for they are warm-blooded, air-breathers, and sucklers of their young, and are most strangely adapted for life in a watery element. Oddly enough the term "Fish" is still applied to them by the whalers, though they have nothing in common with these creatures save a certain similitude in shape. The vulgar notion of a Whale is an enormous creature with an extremely capacious mouth, but the fact is that many of the Cetacea are of relatively moderate dimensions, though doubtless, on the other hand, the magnitude of some is perfectly amazing. Thus, in size they are variable as a group, a range of from five or six feet (equal to the stature of man) to seventy or eighty feet giving sufficiently wide limits. With certain exceptions, notwithstanding length, an average-sized Whale by no means conveys to the eye the same idea of vastness, say for instance, as does an Elephant. The reason is that most Cetaceans are of a club shape, the compact cylindrical body and long narrow tapering tail reducing the idea of size...
The singular gas termed ozone has attracted a large amount of attention from chemists and meteorologists. The vague ideas which were formed as to its nature when as yet it had been but newly discovered, have given place gradually to more definite views; and though we cannot be said to have thoroughly mastered all the difficulties which this strange element presents, yet we know already much that is interesting and instructive. Let us briefly consider the history of ozone.
This book will also deal with the Relation of Atmospheric Electricity and Ozone to Health and Disease.
In the strict sense of the word "Nature," it denotes the sum of the phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be; and society, like art, is therefore a part of Nature. But it is convenient to distinguish those parts of Nature in which man plays the part of immediate cause, as something apart; and, therefore, society, like art, is usefully to be considered as distinct from Nature. It is the more desirable, and even necessary, to make this distinction, since society differs from Nature in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the ethical man-the member of society or citizen-necessarily runs counter to that which the non-ethical man-the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom-tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle.
In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of the wolf and of the deer. However imperfect the relics of prehistoric men may be, the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the orgin of the oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a very low type. They strove with their enemies and their competitors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyena, whose lives were spent in the same way; and they were no more to be praised or blamed, on moral grounds, than their less erect and more hairy compatriots...
In all ages volcanoes have played a prominent role in human thought The Vulcan of classic mythology was but the head of a family of earth-gods born of the polytechnic Mediterranean mind fertilized by the "burning mountains" of continents conjoined in the Levant; and in the still lower stages of human development represented by scores of surviving tribes, Fire-Earth deities head the primitive pantheons-indeed, the Vulcanean notion seems to run back to a pristine stage in which the forerunners of living races first stole Vulcan's torch, tamed capricious and ferocious fire even as other [to them] beasts were tamed, and thus took the initial step in that nature-conquest by which man rose above lower life. Certain it is that Vulcanean myths are most dominant in lower savagery, feebler albeit sharper-cut about the birth-time of writing, and decadent during the period of written history.
The history of dolphins is one of the most fascinating and instructive in the history of ideas in the western world. Indeed, it provides one of the most illuminating examples of what has probably occurred many times in human culture a virtually complete loss of knowledge, at least in most segments of the culture, of what was formerly well understood by generations of men.
Dolphins are mammals. They belong in the order Cetacea, suborder Odontoceti, family Delphinidae. Within the Delphinidae there are some twenty-two genera and about fifty-five species. The count includes the Killer Whale, the False Killer Whale, the White Whale, and the Pilot Whale, all of which are true dolphins. There are two subfamilies, the Delphinapterinae, consisting of the two genera Monodon monocerus, the Narwhal, and Delphinapterus leucas, the White Whale or Beluga. These two genera are distinguished by the fact that none of the neck vertebrae are fused, whereas in all remaining genera, embraced in the subfamily Delphininae, at least the first and second neck vertebrae are fused.
It was Aristotle in his History of Animals (521b) who first classified whales, porpoises, and dolphins as Cetacea, . Aristotle's account of the Cetacea was astonishingly accurately written, and quite evidently from firsthand knowledge of these animals...
