RIGHT WHALES 127 



our coasts ; the reputed occurrences of Right whale 

 in British seas seem to concern Balana australis. 



This great creature, bulky though it undoubtedly 

 is, has been very much over-rated as to its size. 

 Scoresby, whose experience was large, says, in his 

 Account of the Arctic Regions, that such dimensions 

 as So or 100 feet are quite absurd; of 322 indi- 

 viduals, in the capture of which Scoresby was himself 

 concerned, not a single one exceeded 60 feet in 



o 



lenath. The largest ever measured by himself was 



o o * 



only 58 feet. An unusual specimen caught off 

 Spitzbergen at the beginning of the century was 

 barely 70 feet in length, though its whalebone was 

 as long as 15 feet. Even the older observers, who 

 had a tendency to exaggerate the size of these 

 sea monsters, were not always unreliable upon this 

 point. Edge, at the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century, contented himself with describing the Green- 

 land whale as "a sea beaste of huge bigness, 

 about 65 foot long." The head of this whale 

 is about a third of its total length. There is a 

 slight hairy covering in the form of a few scattered, 

 short, white hairs at the extremity of both jaws. 



Though the whale is usually black, Scoresby relates 

 that he has seen specimens that were piebald all 

 over an exaggeration of the occasional white tracts 

 that are normal for the species. 



This whale has no voice, though they make a 

 loud noise in spouting. It swims slowly, usually at 

 the rate of four miles an hour ; but when diving 



