of the great cuttle-fish, and a test of the genuine character of
ambergris which forms as a concretion in the intestine of the
sperm-whale is that it contains fragments of the horny beaks and hooks
of the cuttle-fish digested by the whale. The food of the whalebone
whales consists of minute crustacea and of the little floating
molluscs known as _Clio borealis_, as big as the last joint of one's
little finger, which float by millions in the Arctic Ocean. The
whalebone whales, after letting their huge mouths fill with the
sea-water in which these creatures are floating, squeeze it out
through the strainer formed by the whalebone palisade on each side--by
raising the tongue and floor of the mouth. The water passes out
through the strainer, and the nourishing morsels remain.

Some fossil jaws and skulls of whales from miocene and older tertiary
strata are known which tend to connect the toothed whales with those
mammals not modified for marine life. But the approach in that
direction does not go very far. The extinct whales called Squalodon
have tusk-like front teeth and molars which have the outline of a leaf
with a coarsely "serrated" edge. The bones of the face are also, in
them, more like those of an ordinary mammal than is the case with
modern toothed whales. The snout is not so long, and the bones which
form it are a little more like those of a fox's snout than are those
of the dolphin's "beak." But on the whole it is astonishing how little
we know of fossil whales. We have yet to discover ancestral forms
possessing small hind legs, but whale-like in other features. Some day
a lucky "fossil-hunter" will come upon the remains of a series of
whale-ancestors probably of Eocene age, and we shall know the steps by
which a quadruped was changed into a cetacean--just as we have
recently learned the history of the development of elephants. We know
even less about the ancestry of bats and the steps by which they
acquired their wings than we do about the history of whales. These
discoveries await future generations of men when "cuttings" and "pits"
and quarries shall have been made in the rest of the earth's surface
to the same extent as they have been in Europe and in parts of the
American continent.

CHAPTER XXVII

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE

I submit, as the final chapter of this little volume of miscellaneous
diversions, a few words intended to meet what has become a recurrent
misrepresentation and absurdit