244 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



of Sanda, off the south end of Kintyre, about forty years ago. If 

 the too eager " sportsman of kind " could resist the temptation 

 of shooting at such rare visitors when they do come our way, there 

 might still be some chance of them taking up their abode in Clyde 

 waters again. ALEXANDER GRAY, Curator, Marine Biological 

 Station, Millport. 



The White-beaked Dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris, Gray) 

 in Bute, with Remarks on the Dolphins of the Clyde Waters. 

 In November last Mr. John Robertson found, cast up on the beach, 

 about a mile north of St. Ninian's Bay, Bute, the carcase of a small 

 cetacean, of which he wrote me at the time that " it was rather 

 badly mangled, the tail and lower jaw being awanting. . . . The 

 length as it lay was about 7 feet, but doubtless in life it would 

 be another 18 inches or 2 feet longer." In June Mr. Robertson 

 and other members of the Andersonian Naturalists' Society re- 

 covered the skull and sternum, well cleaned by nature, and sent 

 them to me to be identified and shown at a meeting of the Society. 

 I made the species to be the above named, an identification which 

 has been very kindly confirmed by Professor Sir Wm. Turner, with 

 whom the skull has been left to be placed in the Anatomical 

 Museum, Edinburgh. This museum has already a skull of this 

 species from the Clyde, from an animal shot by Mr. J. Y. Buchanan 

 in Kilbrannan Sound in September 1879, as recorded by Sir Wm. 

 Turner ("Proc. Roy. Phys. Soc. Edin.," 1891, x. p. 14), who 

 further states that he saw in these waters, in August 1887, what 

 he believed to be a school of the White-beaked Dolphin. It may 

 be repeated here that we claim this Clyde specimen (obtained by 

 Mr. Buchanan) as the first authentic record of the species in Scottish 

 waters, as it ante-dates by one year the example obtained near the 

 Bell Rock ("Zoologist," iSSi, pp. 41-44), and which Messrs. South- 

 well ("Seals and Cetaceans of the British Seas," 1881, p. 127) and 

 Lydekker ("British Mammalia," 1896, p. 293) erroneously state 

 to be the first from Scotland. In the Kelvingrove Museum, Glas- 

 gow, were four examples of this species (a stuffed specimen and 

 three skeletons, one being a fetus), all from Kilbrannan Sound, 

 captured in 1894 and 1895 ("Zoologist," 1894, pp. 424-426, 

 and "Glasgow Herald," 7th September 1895). These occurrences 

 seem to indicate that the animal so well known in the waters of the 

 Firth of Clyde as the " bucker," and in Loch Fyne as the "stinker," 

 is identical with this species. Fishermen and yachtsmen clearly 

 distinguish it from the Porpoise by its larger size and by its con- 

 spicuous habit of leaping out of the water ; by the Loch Fyne men 

 this is said to be "the stinkers threshing." I have seen a school 

 of about a dozen in the shallow waters of Whiting Bay, playing 

 and gambolling round the ferry-boat, throwing themselves well clear 

 of the water and falling back again with a resounding splash, a fine 



