The Scottish Naturalist. 103 



light on this subject. These authors shew pretty conclusively, 

 from the journals kept at the Danish establishments on the 

 western shore of Greenland, that the whale was never known to 

 leave the neighbourhood of the ice-bergs. These establishments 

 extend from the 60th to the 73d degree, in a direction almost 

 due north. The journal kept at Holsteinsborg, extending from 

 1780 to 1839, and that at Disco Bay, farther northward, from 

 1780 to 1837, give the dates every year when the whales arrived 

 at these stations, which was generally in the end of November 

 or beginning of December, some years as late as January ; the 

 dates of their departure to the north again being March, April, 

 and occasionally as late as June : both events depending ap- 

 parently on the temperature of the season. The conclusion 

 arrived at by the Danish authors, apparently after carefully con- 

 sidering all the facts in their possession bearing on this sub- 

 ject, amounts to this, "that the Greenland whale penetrates 

 farthest to the south in winter, although it does not, even at 

 that season, leave that part of the sea which is filled with drift 

 ice, and more or less closed by great masses of ice." The long 

 persecution these animals have undergone has sadly diminished 

 their number. At the same time, they do not appear to have 

 changed in the least their former habits and places of migration, 

 " the original range of the whale remaining perfectly unaltered." 

 Prof. Van Beneden* also states that B. mysticetus is strictly 

 confined in its geographical range to the Polar Sea, extending 

 along the Siberian and Kamtschatkan coasts, but does not 

 reach as far south as the north of Iceland. Scoresby,t who, 

 from personal experience, knew the haunts of the Greenland 

 whale better perhaps than the most of men who have had some- 

 thing to say about it, states that it has never been seen in the 

 European seas, and rarely within 200 leagues of the British 

 coast, and that it was only to be met with in or very near the 

 regions of ice. If we now glance at the evidence as to the oc- 

 currence of this whale in the British seas, we will perhaps find 

 that it is not of the strongest, or to say the least, of the most 

 satisfactory kind. Of course, if the opinions of these dis- 

 tinguished naturalists as to the geographical range of this animal 

 could be implicitly relied upon, we could scarcely expect the 



*Bull. de l'Acad. Roy. de Belg., xxv,, 1868. f Arctic Regions. 



