66 KNOX ON THE CETACEA. 



I believe, as the one described by Mr. Hunter and Fabricius ; it is a 

 distinct species, and not merely the young of the Great Eorqual. 



I shall return to the Dugong, as not being a Cetacean, in a 

 future Section : its skeleton has been examined in a masterly way 

 by De Blainville, an anatomist and observer of the highest order, 

 since the time I wrote and published my Memoir on the Dugong. 



The first great step in the anatomy of the Cetacea is unques- 

 tionably due to Cuvier ; but his dissections were almost confined 

 to the genus Delphinus, or the common Porpoise of our coasts. I 

 repeated all his dissections, and found them, as they almost always 

 were, scrupulously exact ; but when I came to examine Cetacea 

 with whalebone instead of teeth, I was surprised to find how 

 difierent, in fact, the anatomy of the two great families was. 

 Scarcely in any great natural family do we find Cuvier' s favourite 

 theory of anatomical and physiological co-relations so entirely at 

 fault as in the Cetacea. The teeth or whalebone, as natural-history 

 characters, lead to no results ; the whole structure of the interior 

 defies all a-priori reasoning. The brain in whalebone-whales does 

 not fill the interior of the cranium ; so that the capacity of the one 

 is no measure of the solid bulk of the other. Their food is 

 various, having no relation to the teeth or buccal appendages; 

 vascular structures surround the spinal marrow, and extend in the 

 Balwnopterce into the cavity of the cranium, which seem to be 

 without any analogy in other mammals, or, at the least, a very 

 obscure one, and whose functions are wholly unknown. 



Cetacea might with some propriety be divided into whales with 

 whalebone, and whales with teeth. Those with whalebone have 

 rudimentary teeth in both jaws in the foetal state. Fossil Cetacea 

 exist, and they seem to have been of both kinds, but, no doubt, 

 were generically and specifically distinct from the recent. Jud- 

 ging from the remains of those I have seen, I am inclined to think 

 that those with teeth were of a stronger and firmer build in the 

 skeleton than those called recent; that the neck was longer, 

 and the caudal portion of the column shorter than in the recent 

 kinds, and that they approached the Saurians in form. There is 

 a remarkable want of symmetry in the crania of some of the 

 Cetacea ; but most remarkable is the cranium of the Narwhal. Of 

 this fact I have already spoken, in the article published in the 

 Transactions of the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh. 



Delphinus PJioccena. Dissection of a small Cetacean sent to me 

 from Orkney in the month of May 1835. — This species is said to 

 abound on the coasts, and to furnish a kind of fishery to the in- 



