A photograph of a candle, in case you had difficulty working that out. Wikipedia, my trusty guide, tells me that while modern candles are usually made of paraffin, back in the day they could be made from beeswax, tallow, or even spermaceti extracted from the head of a sperm whale. Poor sperm whales. I was amused to note that their scientific name is physeter macrocephalus. I confess don't know what "physeter" means, but "macrocephalus" translates as "bloody big head".
I was also intrigued to discover that sperm whales have the largest mammalian brain both in proportion to its body size and mass, and is the only living creature that has a gullet large enough to swallow a human whole. The most famous sperm whale is obviously Moby Dick, but I have to admit that I wasn't a fan of the book. The only aspects of it that I really enjoyed were the ones in which Herman Melville got into the scientific aspects of whaling. There's nothing like the smug feeling of reading an author whose book you're not enjoying strenuously denying the existence of the blue whales we now know really do exist. Okay, so Melville was a Victorian living in the pre-Attenborough age, but that's not the point.
