Another Good Book

Here’s an excerpt from the book I’m currently reading. It’s quite good; I highly recommend it.


The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
     By Philip Hoare

“Whales existed before man, but they have been known to us only for two or three generations: until the invention of underwater photography, we hardly knew what they looked like. It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the first free-swimming whale was photographed underwater. The first underwater film of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently thought the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like. Even now there are beaked whales, or ziphiids, known only from bones washed up on remote beaches – esoteric, deep-see animals with strange markings which biologists have never seen alive or dead, so little studied that their status is “data deficient’. New cetaceans are still being identified in the twenty-first century, and we would do well to remember that the world harbours animals bigger than ourselves which we have yet to see; that not everything is cataloged and claimed and digitized. That in the oceans great whales swim unnamed by man.”