90 



why we never find them adhering to the vertebras of those young 

 whales which have been wrecked on our coast, and whose skeletons 

 have been exposed to the action of the waves and the weather. Their 

 flat shape too renders them liable to be covered by the sand, and 

 hence I have never known them to be found separately, even when 

 the vertebrae and other bones of this species of whale were scattered 

 along the coast in great numbers, as happened at Dungarvan some 

 years after several of these animals had been captured and dragged 

 ashore by the fishermen. 



The bones I have described must evidently be considered in the 

 light of terminal epiphyses of the bodies of the vertebrae, and are 

 deserving of notice on account of the facility with which they can be 

 detached, even in very large, and of course not very young animals of 

 this species, as I observed in the two skeletons preserved in the Col- 

 lege of Surgeons, one of which measures thirty feet in length; so that 

 when the skeleton has been artificially prepared, they resemble sepa- 

 rate intervertebral bones rather than vertebral epiphyses. In the 

 land mammalia the consolidation takes place much more rapidly, and 

 a few years are sufficient to efface all traces of former separation be- 

 tween the epiphysis and the body of the vertebra; the comparative 

 slowness of this process in the whale, is probably referable to the 

 longevity of the animal, and the greater length of time necessary 

 to complete its growth. A knowledge of this fact puts us in pos- 

 session of a new and useful mark of the animal's age, independant 

 of its size, and it is for this purpose I have brought it forward, for 

 although not noticed by any author I have seen on the Anatomy 

 of Whales, it must nevertheless have been known to several. If we 

 find that the terminal epiphysis has become completely united to the 

 body of the vertebra, we may be assured that the bone, whether 

 large or small, belonged to an animal arrived at maturity ; but if not, 

 we may conclude that it had not yet attained to its greatest size. To 



