whalebone
Few persons know what the whalebone of commerce represents in the living animal. A writer thus describes it:

Whalebone, in fact, represents an enormous development of the gum of the whale, and exists in the living animal in the form of two rows of plates, which, like a great double fringe, hang or descend from its palate.

From one hundred and fifty to two hundred of these plates exist in the mouth of a whale, and the largest plates may measure from eight to ten or twelve feet in lenth. THe inner edges of these whalebone plates exhitib a fringed or frayed-out appearance, and the whole apparatus is adapted to serve as a kind of gigantic sieve or strainer.

Thus when the whale fills the mouth with water, large numbers of small or minute animals, allied to jelly-fishes and thelike, are ingulfed and drawn into the capacious mouth cavity.

The water is allowed to escape by the sides of the mouth, but its solid animal contents are strained off and entangled by the whalebone fringes, and when a sufficient quantity of food has been captured in this way, the morsel is duly swallowed. Thus it is somewhat curious to reflect that the largest animals are supported by some of the smallest beings. --The Youth's Companion, October 10, 1878, page 332, column 2
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:48 AM