Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/386

370 know on what the ages are based further than that the young are darker in color for a time.

"How does the breathing of the big one sound to you?" the doctor asked.

"Like ours at Coney Island that died from lung trouble," I replied, "and I would not have brought that animal down unless it was the only one to be had during the season."

"I think I'll give her about ten days to live," replied the doctor.

As these were not my whales, I declined to talk of their prospects of life to several reporters who knew me, and the whale in question died of pneumonia on June llth, just a week after its arrival in New York, and several days before the trained ear of Dr. Latham had allotted its span of life.

The male came to its death by an accident at 9 on June 24th, just twenty days after arrival. An eel got into its blow-hole and it drowned. According to an account published in the New York Sun of Monday, July 26, 1897, said to be obtained from Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, director of the aquarium, the whale "was as healthy a one as ever spouted until late on Friday afternoon, the 24th, when one of the keepers noticed that something was wrong. His attention was attracted by the loud wheezing that accompanied each blow that the whale made when he came up for air. The wheezing could be heard all over the aquarium. Dr. Bean was sent for. He was certain that the whale's lungs were all right. He cited a fact, known to the custodian and to all the keepers, that the mammal for the past month had remained under water a little longer after he came to the surface to blow. This convinced Dr. Bean that the whale's lungs were sound and that some other cause of illness must be found."

Then the whale coughed out a piece of an eel that it had bit in two, and as it came up to blow again there was another piece hanging from the blow-hole which could not shut, and so let water into the lungs. Dr. Bean ordered the water drawn off the tank in order to get at the animal, but a fomier superintendent, who had planned the tanks, had put in such small drainage pipes that by the time the water was drawn down so that the men could get at the whale it was dead.

I do not believe that a white whale lived two years in Boston, because this subarctic animal could not endure the extremes of Boston's temperatures without contracting lung disease in some form. Think of such an animal living through climatic conditions that an Eskimo can not stand, and in a public institution where thousands of people are vitiating the air!

Animals which live wholly in water are more susceptible to