AMBERGRISE, (Encycl.) In the Philosophical Transactions we meet with an account of the origin of substance, very different from the commonly received one of its being a natural bitumen. This account was communicated to the Society by Paul Dudley, Esq; who had it from an American shipmaster. It is in substance the same with the account given by Doctor Douglas in his Historical and Political Summary of the English Colonies, vol. i. p. 57. "Ambergrise," says he, "is now fully discovered to be some production of the spermaceti whale; for some time it was imagined some peculiar concreted juice lodged in a peculiar cystis, in the same manner as is the castoreum of the beaver or fiber canadensis, and the zibethum of the civet-cat or hyæna, in cystises on both sides in the animæ. Thus, not long since, some of our Nantucket whalers imagined, that in some (very few and rare) of these male or bull-whales, they had found the gland or cystis in the loins near the spermatic organs: late and more accurate observations seem to declare it to be some part of the ordure, dung, or alvine excrement of the whale. Squid fish, one of the Newfoundland baits for cod, are sometimes in Newfoundland cast ashore in quantities; and as they corrupt and fry in the sun, they become a jelly or substance of an ambergrise smell; therefore, as squid bills are sometimes found in the lumps of ambergrise, it may be inferred, that ambergrise is some of the excrement from squid food, with some singular circumstances or dispositions that procure this quality seldom concurring. Thus the Nantucket whalers, for some years last past, have found no ambergrise in their whales."
In the sixth volume of Goldsmith's Natural History, we find an account somewhat different from the foregoing. He tells us, that it is found in the cachalot or spermaceti whale, in the place where the feminal vessels are usually situated in other animals. It is found in a bag of three or four feet long, in round lumps, from one to 20 pounds weight, floating in a fluid rather thinner than oil, and of a yellowish colour. There are never more seen than four at a time in one of these bags; and that which weighed 20 pounds, and which was the largest ever seen, was found single. These balls of ambergrise are not found in all fishes of this kind, but chiefly in the oldest and strongest. In the 73d volume of Philosophical Transactions, Dr Schwediawer gives an account very similar to the former one.