...Then Allen went on. "Since we opened the whales in any case when the weather allowed it Mr Leadbetter took the opportunity to look into their anatomies."

"Excellent. Very good," said Stephen.

"And as he and I were particular friends I used to help him: I wish I could remember a tenth of the things he explained to me, but it was all a great while ago. Teeth in the lower jaw only, I recall; the two nostrils uniting to make a single valved blow hole and therefore an asymmetrical skull; scarcely more than a trace of pelvis, no clavicles, no gall-bladder, no caecum - "

"No caecum!" cried Stephen.

"No sir, none at all! I remember how on one calm day with the whale floating easy by the ship we passed the whole length of the intestine through our hands, a hundred and six fathoms in all - "

"Oh no," murmured Jack, pushing his glass from him.

" - without finding even a hint of one. No caecum: but on the other hand an enormous heart, a yard long. I remember how we put one in a net and hoisted it aboard; he measured and calculated that it pumped ten or eleven gallons of blood a stroke - the aorta was a foot across. And I remember how soon we got used to standing there among the huge warm guts, and how one day we opened one that had a calf in her and he showed me the umbilicus, placenta, and..."

Jack abstracted his mind from Allen's account. He had seen more blood shed in anger than most men and he was not unduly squeamish; but placid butchery he could not bear.

--from The Far Side Of The World, by Patrick O'Brian


back to anat now...