THE ORDER CETACEA. 5 



ing broad serrated teeth, a mistake into which Linn£eus 

 has also fallen. 



Among the last writers who have classed the cetacea 

 as an order of fishes is Mr. Pennant, who has borrowed 

 much of his information from Sir Robert Sibbald's 

 works, and has also gleaned freely both from the an- 

 cients and from some modern voyages of travels and 

 histories, as Dale's " Account of Harwich ;" Martin's 

 " History of Spitzbergen ;" Crantz's " Greenland ;" and 

 Borlase's "Account of Cornwall.'' The blunt-headed 

 cachalot he seems to have described entirely from his 

 own observation. He has given a figure of the animal, 

 with its teeth. 



The most complete and scientific account of the ceta- 

 cea is, however, to be found in the " Histoire Naturelle 

 des Cetacees" of Count La Cepede, published in Paris 

 in 1 804. John Hunter has given the best account of the 

 anatomy and physiology of these animals;* the Abbe 

 Bonnaterre has described in the "Encyclopedic M£- 

 thodique," in an excellent article on " cetology," their 

 natural history ; but La Cepede has condensed all that 

 was valuable on the subject, having reduced it to form 

 and method, and improved the whole with a very scien- 

 tific arrangement and animated description, though he 

 has included many serious errors. He has distributed 

 the thirty-four varieties or species of cetacea into two 

 orders, the toothless and the toothed : of the former he 

 makes two tribes and eight species ; of the latter, eight 

 tribes and twenty-six species. His division of the genera 

 is certainly more scientific than that of any of his prede- 

 cessors, inasmuch as it is founded on anatomical differ- 

 ences; and though the generic and specific characters 

 are often unnecessarily long, and involve circumstances 



* Vide Philosophical Transactions, vol. i.xxvii. part ii. p. 371. 



