no The Scottish Naturalist. 



we may observe that it was found floating dead in the sea, at 

 the mouth of the Firth of Forth, and towed ashore near North 

 Berwick, in October, 1831. It was 80 feet in length ; the cir- 

 cumference, 34 feet; pectoral fins, 11 feet long; breadth of the 

 tail, 20 feet. The only other whale to be noticed, that has 

 occurred on the north-east of Scotland, so far as I know, is 

 Sibbald's Abercorn example, of 1692, which has been already 

 remarked on. It is probable that the whale, 82 feet long, men- 

 tioned by Scoresby as killed in Balta Sound, Shetland, in the 

 winter of 1817-18, may also belong to this species, as he states 

 that the longest lamina of baleen was about 3 feet long. 



BAL^NOPTERA ROSTRATA.-The PlKE WHALE. 

 This little species was long confounded with the larger individu- 

 als of the family, chiefly with Physalus a?itiquorum of which it was 

 supposed by many zoologists to be the young and undeveloped 

 condition, and that the differences between them, although ap- 

 parent — to some at least — would ultimately disappear with age. 

 This opinion was retained by some long after Fabricius, Traill, 

 Scoresby, and others, had pointed out the fact that it was the 

 smallest of the whale-bone whales, and that it differed other- 

 wise from the larger specimens. Scoresby* figured and described 

 one that was killed in Orkney, in 1808. The circumference of 

 this example, however, was 10 feet, not 20 feet, as stated in his 

 description. Dr. Knox t was the first to point out clearly the 

 difference, anatomically, between this whale and the larger 

 species, mainly from his examination of the skeleton of the 

 Queensferry specimen, in 1834, which, as he showed, contained 

 in all 48 vertebrae; while his Balena maximi/s borealis, the bones 

 of which he had amongst hands at the time, contained 6$ verte- 

 brae. Since Knox's time it has been recognized by all ceto- 

 logists. As stated above, it is the smallest of the baleen whales, 

 and seldom exceeds 25, rarely 30, feet in length. It seems to 

 be pretty generally distributed throughout the seas of. central 

 Europe. Van Beneden's map,J however, shows its occurrence 

 six times only in British waters. Although not very common, 



* Arctic Regions. f Edin. Phil. Jour. 

 X Bull, dc l'Acad. Roy. de Belgique, t. xxvii., 1869. 



