ZOOLOGY. 



THE BALEEN OR WHALE-BONE WHALES (BAL£NOIDEA) 

 OF THE NORTH-EAST OF SCOTLAND. 



By ROBERT WALKER. 



BAL^NA MYSTICETUS.-THE RlGHT WHALE, OR GREEN- 

 LAND Whale. 

 A S this whale has been included heretofore in all our books 

 on British animals, it may be necessary to state briefly 

 some of the grounds, at least, upon which its claim to a place in 

 the British Fauna is now questioned by many naturalists of 

 eminence. From a commercial point of view, this is the most 

 valuable of all the whales that frequent the Greenland seas j 

 its carcass yielding a greater quantity of oil, and a longer and 

 better quality of baleen, or whalebone of commerce, than that 

 of any other species. In order to supply the demand for these 

 valuable products, the "Whalers" of this and other countries 

 proceed to the Arctic regions every spring : the experience of 

 nearly three centuries of whale fishing having proved this to be 

 the natural habitat of this animal, and that it is to be met with 

 only amongst the ice-bergs of that rigorous climate. That this 

 whale has its regular periods of migration, as well as probably 

 every other Arctic animal — proceeding southward in winter, 

 and returning north again in summer — will be evident enough 

 if we bear in mind the fact, that a great portion of the Polar 

 Sea, in which it roams in summer, is frozen every winter, and 

 the impossibility of the animal breathing under the ice. The 

 question, however, remains — granting this migration — how far 

 south was the whale ever known with certainty to go ? The 

 investigations of Eschricht and Reinhardt, given in their ex- 

 cellent essay on the Greenland Whale,* throw considerable 



* Ray Society, 1866. 



