r, is the only person authorized to permit
this operation: but though he was at our hotel, and we were personally
intimate with him, he declined to favour us with the permission, it
being explained that the too-frequent dosing of the geyser had seemed to
have a relaxing effect on the activity.

At Dunedin S---- left me to visit Milford Sound. Too unwell to accompany
him, I continued on to the Bluff and then took steamer to Hobart,
Tasmania. New Zealand has a great whale-fishery and it was my hope to
see something of it by a short trip on one of the ships employed; but
the opportunity did not present itself.

May I here offer a few notes picked up on the subject of whales, etc.
The sperm or cachalot whale is a dangerous and bold fighter and is
perhaps the most interesting of all cetaceans. His skin, like that of
the porpoise, is as thin as gold-beaters' leaf. Underneath it is a
coating of fine hair or fur, not attached to the skin, and then the
blubber. He has enormous teeth or tushes in the lower jaw, but has no
baleen. He devours very large fish, even sharks, but his principal food
seems to be cuttle-fish and squids, some of them of as great bulk as
himself. These cuttle-fish's tentacle discs are as big as soup-plates,
and surrounded by hooks as large and sharp as tiger claws; while their
mouths are armed with a parrot-like beak capable of rending anything
held to them by the tentacles. These disc hooks are often found in
ambergris, an excretion of the sperm whale. The sperm whale spouts
diagonally, other whales upwards. So-called porpoise leather is made of
the skin of the white whale. The porpoise is the true dolphin, the
sailor's dolphin being a fish with vertical tail, scales and gills.
Bonitoes are a species of mackerel, but warm-blooded and having
beef-like flesh.

Near Hobart I saw the famous fruit and hop lands on the Derwent River.
It was midsummer here and extremely hot, hotter than in Melbourne or
anywhere else on this trip. From Hobart I railed to Launceston and
thence steamer to Melbourne.

Melbourne is a very handsome city as we all know. It was my hope to
continue on with S---- north by the Barrier Reef, or rather between the
reef and the mainland, and so on to China, Japan, Corea, and home by
Siberia; but my doctor advised me not to attempt it, so I booked passage
for Colombo instead, and S---- and myself necessarily parted. But it was
with much regret that I missed this wonderful coasting trip, lon