146 The Irish Naturalist. August, 
Breeding of Whales. 
Only one young whale is born at a time, twins being 
very rare. The young are born in the winter or early 
spring, and are said to be from a quarter to a third the 
length of the mother. 
Size and Colour of Whales. 
In a brief review of the whales, porpoises and dolphins 
observed in Irish waters,^ I endeavoured to give the sizes 
of the specimens so far as they were known to me. But 
the measurements, which were mostly extracted from 
newspaper reports, were frequently doubtfully accurate, 
while in many cases none were obtained at all. Hence, 
we knew very little from actual observation of the size of 
these creatures frequenting the Irish seas. Mr. Burfield 
paid special attention to this subject. 
The largest Irish whale is the Blue Whale (Balaenoptera 
Sihhaldi). It was reported to me that in 1908 a specimen 
was captured at Inishkea, measuring 88 feet, while Mr. 
Burfield records one of 84 feet. All the Blue Whales seen 
by Mr. Burfield were females. 
Of the Common " Finner," as it is often called (Balaen- 
optera musculus), a skeleton of which is suspended from 
the ceiling in our Natural History Museum, few exact 
measurements had been recorded. Mr. Burfield gives no 
less than fifty-three. The largest specimen measured, 
which was a female, was 75 feet long, the largest male being 
68 feet. 
As it has been suggested by some authorities that the 
Blue Whale and Common Finner might prove to be 
varieties of the same species, Mr. Burfield's remarks on 
this point are noteworthy. In the colour and arrangement 
of the grooves there is no great difference between the two, 
but the dorsal fin of the Blue Whale is relatively much 
smaller than that of the other. The whalebone of the 
Blue Whale is thicker than that of the Finner, and of a 
* ScHARFF, R. F. : a list of the Irish Ceta^cea. Irish Naturalist, vol. ix., 
pp. 83-91, 1900. 
