238 CETACEA 



passing freely from one to the other, it is never seen so far south 

 as Cape Farewell ; but on the Labrador coast, where a cold stream 

 sets down from the north, its range is somewhat farther. In the 

 Behring Sea, according to Scammon, "it is seldom seen south of 

 the fifty-fifth parallel, which is about the farthest southern extent 

 of the winter ice, Avhile on the Sea of Okhotsk its southern limit is 

 about the latitude of 54°." As has been abundantly shown by 

 Eschricht and Bernhardt in the case of the Greenland seas, " every- 

 thing tends to prove," Scammon says, " that the Balcena mysticetus 

 is truly an ' ice Avhale,' for among the scattered floes, or about the 

 borders of the ice-fields or barriers, is its home and feeding-ground. 

 It is true that these animals are pursued in the open water during 

 the summer months ; but in no instance have we learned of their 

 being captured south of where winter ice-fields are occasionally met 

 with." The occurrence of this species, therefore, on the British or 

 any European coast is exceedingly unlikely, as when alive and in 

 health the southern limit of its range in the North Sea has been 

 ascertained to be from the east coast of Greenland at 64° N. lat. 

 along the north of Iceland towards Spitzbergen, and a glance at a 

 physical chart will show that there are no currents setting south- 

 wards which could bear a disabled animal or a floating carcase to 

 British shores. To this a priori improbability may be added the 

 fact that no authentic instance has been recorded of the capture or 

 stranding of this species upon any European coast ; for the cases 

 in which it has been reported as seen in British waters may be ex- 

 plained by the supposition of one of the other species of the genus 

 being mistaken for it. Still, as two other essentially Arctic 

 Cetaceans, the Narwhal and the Beluga, have in a few undoubted 

 instances found their way to British shores, it would be rash 

 absolutely to deny the possibility of the Greenland Bight Whale 

 doino- the same. 



Fig. 77.— Southern Right Whale (Balcena australis). 



The southern Bight Whale (B. australis, Fig. 77) resembles the 

 last in the absence of dorsal fin and of longitudinal furrows in the 

 skin of the throat and chest, but differs in that it possesses a smaller 

 head in proportion to its body, shorter baleen, a different shaped 

 contour of the upper margin of the lower lip, and a greater number 



