alternate with one another, and are expressed in religious phraseology used by all pious Hebrews.

There is no natural reason why the situation should ever come to an end, except by the death by thirst of Jonah, or the death and stranding of the whale. But the story says that God commanded the fish (27 wayyō'mer Y" laddāg) and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

:

This seems to the writer a reasonable and consistent account. As usual with the author of Jonah, there is not a word more about the "fish." Whether it died, as stranded whales often do,* or slid back into deep water is not told. As it had nothing further to do with the purpose of the story, there is not another word about it.

(38) The writer will now give his authorities for all the assertions made in the last paragraph.

Whales are not only the largest of living mammals, but the largest of all animals, mammalian or otherwise, which have ever existed (Beddard, p. 2). The accounts of their length vary. Beddard, who is very careful to avoid the possibility of exaggeration, allows a length of 85 feet to Balanoptera Sibbaldii (Beddard, p. 1), This is a Mediterranean whale (Scott, p. 121), so is Balæna Australis (Beddard, p. 124). Scott (p. 121) and Jardine (p. 137) contend for a measured length of 102 feet and 105 feet. The length is important because the length of the head is given as a fraction of the whole length. That length varies from one-third in the case of Balæna, to two-sevenths or one-quarter in the case of Balanoptera. If we take a length of 85 feet and a mouth of one-quarter the length, we obtain a length for the mouth from back to front of 21 feet. The height of the mouth, when open, is obtained from the length of the whalebone, which varies from 15 feet to 10 feet in Balana, and 8 to 10 feet in Balanoptera Sibbaldii. The breadth of the mouth is given (Jardine, p. 77) as 10 to 12 feet. Taking all the smallest figures, we have for the dimensions of the mouth 21 feet × 8 feet x 10 feet. Of course, this space is not rectangular, and room has to be allowed for the gigantic, almost immobile (Jardine, p. 81; Scott, p. 132) tongue. But the empty space cannot

* A whale's body is from 36 to 40 feet in circumference. It would therefore require over 12 feet of water to float in; to eject Jonah on to dry land it must approach a sandy shore in much less than 12 feet, and would therefore have been stranded.

well be less than 1,000 cubic feet. The body of a man weighing 11 stone occupies about 2 cubic feet. It is, therefore, no exaggeration when Scott states (p. 132) that the whale's mouth is "capable of containing a ship's jolly-boat full of men."

In Sir Michael Foster's handbook of physiology (chap. ii, p. 581) it is stated that a man requires 2,000 litres of fresh air an hour for breathing. Two thousand litres would measure two cubic metres or 70 cubic feet. The ordinary time a whale remains under water is 10 minutes (Beddard, p. 128), but it may extend to an hour. Even in that case, the presence of a man helping to consume the air in the mouth would make no appreciable difference. Attempts made to swim across the Channel have often failed owing to the chilling of the swimmer's body by long continued immersion in the cold water of that part of the sea. But the mean surface temperature of the water of the Eastern Mediterranean is over 70° F. (Encycl. Brit., edn. 11, vol. 18, p. 68 (c)), while the blood temperature of whales is very high, viz., 104° F. (Jardine, p. 52).* This would be the temperature of the air in a whale's mouth when the animal was under water. The temperature, therefore, would be quite consistent with a man's existence, even though often immersed in water. (39) The following description of the whalebone and the manner in which whales feed is taken from Scott (pp. 132, 133 and 134). It relates to the Balæna Mysticetus or Right Whale, but Beddard (pp. 6 and 135; see also pp. 124, 127, 129, 131) points out that the differences between it and Balæna Australis are very slight. The differences between it and Balanoptera Sibbaldii are small and structural only, so the following description applies to them as much as to Balæna Mysticetus, about which it was written [see also Encycl. Brit., vol. 5; 771 (b)].

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Scott says (p. 60) :—“ The blood of all Cetaceans is warm, and consequently they are compelled to breathe the atmospheric air by means of true lungs, placed within the cavity of the chest, and have to rise periodically to the surface of the water in order to respire; should any accident frustrate this indispensable requirement they would literally be drowned."

Beddard says:-- "This whale

at the rate of four miles an hour; a velocity of seven to nine miles.

swims slowly, usually

but when diving they reach This velocity is so great that

* See also the figures in Encycl. Brit., vol. v, p. 770 (c), which are slightly

lower.

F

whales have been found to dive to the bottom of water a mile in depth and to break the lower jaw by the violence of the impact [pp. 127 and 128. (See also the Badminton Library volume on Sea Fishing, pp. 481 and 491.)].

Scott says, speaking of Balæna Mysticetus (p. 132) :- The plates of baleen" (i.e. whalebone) "proceed from each side of the narrow upper jaw, and, spreading outwards, enclose at their lower ends the huge, soft, immovable tongue, presenting an ideal resemblance to the canvas falling from a tent-pole over a monster feather-bed."

elsewhere.

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(40) Two more extracts must suffice: The small marine animals on which these Cetaceans feed cover in the aggregate (i.e. in the Arctic Ocean alone) "some 20,000 square miles of the surface of the open ocean. They are also very abundant . . In feeding, the lower jaw is let down and the rate of speed increased; the huge cavity thus urged along secures, like a fisherman's net, a rich harvest of insect game. This operation being often repeated, the combined proceeds of the several hauls serve at length to satisfy the capacious maw of the monster" (Scott, p. 133.)

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The structure and action of the whalebone is thus (pp. 132 and 133) described by Beddard :—“ The length and delicate structure of the baleen provides an efficient strainer or hair sieve, by which the water can be drained off the long slender brush-like ends of the whalebone blades, when the mouth is closed, fold back, the front ones passing below the hinder ones in a channel lying between the tongue and the bone of the lower jaw. When the mouth is opened, their elasticity causes them to straighten out like a bow that is unbent, so that at whatever distance the jaws are separated, the strainer remains in perfect action, filling the whole of the interval; the mechanical perfection of the arrangement is completed by the great development of the lower lip, which rises stiffly above the jaw-bone, and prevents the long, slender, flexible ends of the baleen being carried outwards by the rush of water from the mouth, when its cavity is being diminished by the closure of the jaws and raising of the tongue.

"The food thus filtered off by the action of the whalebone and the raising of the tongue and shutting of the jaws is left stranded upon the gigantic tongue and then swallowed down the narrow throat. It is accordingly not advantageous that this tongue should be mobile and muscular; it is, as a matter of

fact, mainly formed of a mass of spongy fat intermixed with sinewy flesh."

(41) There is one other detail which, comparatively unimportant in itself, acquires great importance from a verse in the Psalm in chap. ii, viz., v. 5, which runs: "The deep was round about me; the weeds were wrapped about my head."

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All the critics find this line very difficult. Cheyne calls it odd and certainly corrupt " (Studia Biblica (Jonah) ), and proposes, as his manner is, to alter nearly all the Hebrew words. But it appears to the writer that the following observations of a naturalist on the food of the whale furnish a simple and appropriate explanation.

The American naturalist, Dr. Gray, says of a great whale which he calls Megaptera Americana "they feed much upon grass (Zostera) growing at the bottom of the sea; in their great bag of maw he found two or three hogsheads of a greenish grassy matter" (Scott, p. 130), and Scott himself says:-"These huge Cetaceans derive their sustenance by preying upon the vast hordes of small beings of diversified natures congregated within and around the large area of Gulfweed (Sargassum bacciferum) collected midway in the Atlantic (p. 129) (p. 130) by feeding upon the sea-wrack (note: Zosteraceæ seen at low water on the rocks of all countries in the world) or may be upon the floating Gulfweed itself. Scott is, of course, correct in speaking of the "floating Gulfweed as the food of any whale. That, like other vegetation, requires light and could not grow "at the bottom of the sea.' Nor could any whale feed upon anything "at the bottom of the sea." It has to keep its mouth shut tight when under

water.

But there is no reason to doubt Dr. Gray's observation, though his explanation is not correct in its details. And both Zostera marina and Sargassum bacciferum are abundant in the Mediterranean [see Encycl. Brit., art. Malta, vol. 17, p. 508 (b)].

The observation, of course, only refers to a whale of the genus Megaptera. But Beddard says that Megaptera, which is one of the Balaenopteridæ, is not widely removed in its structural character from Balaenoptera (p. 162), and the details which he gives about it (pp. 162-168) give no reason to suppose that it differs from Balaenoptera Sibbaldii or even Balana Australis in its feeding. The only difference is likely to be in the quantity of gulf-weed swallowed by a whale living on the outskirts of

the Sargasso Sea, which would probably be larger in amount than that which would be carried into the mouth of a whale in the Mediterranean, where the weed would be floating in smaller patches. But it would be quite likely to be taken into the whale's mouth for the reason assigned above by Scott, and when so taken in would be certain to settle on or near the head of a man almost submerged in the sea-water in which the "weed" was floated in.

(42) The very great difficulty found by all the critics in explaining this line makes it the height of improbability that such a detail should be introduced by anyone who had not undergone the experience.

(43) We are now ready to apply all these facts to the narrative and especially to the Psalm in chap. ii. When Jonah was thrown overboard into the raging sea, he must have expected to be drowned immediately (see para. (35)). He found himself instead swept inside a huge "fish" where he would soon realize that he was no longer in danger of drowning. The sailors on board the ship saw him disappear into "the fish" and never at that time reappear. Neither they nor he need be credited with any knowledge of anatomy; it cannot be surprising that they, and even he, thought, and perhaps said, that he had been swallowed." As the whale moved along with its mouth open the water came rushing over him in torrents and rushed out again; but the whalebone screen kept him from going out with the water, and the whale's gullet being very small, two to four or six inches wide, he could not be swallowed.

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This situation closely fits the verse (ii, 3):–

"For Thou didst cast me into the depth, in the heart of the seas,

And the flood [literally the stream (7 nāhār)] was round

about me;

All Thy waves and Thy billows passed over me."

The word nāhār accurately describes the inflow and outflow of the sea-water. The words used for wave ( mis bar) and billow (gal) are specially used of the billows of the sea (Oxford Heb. Dict., s.v.).

All this time, however, Jonah was in the fresh air and light. Then the whale "sounded"; its great lips closed tight, the light and outer air was shut out with the water and Jonah felt himself sinking, sinking down, possibly to the very bottom of the sea.