The Scottish Naturalist. 143 



spot where it lay ; and he states that he caused (I suppose with 

 the assistance of this figure) one to be drawn according to the 

 proportions stated to him by the chief cutter up, and engraved. 

 Sibbald thought the figure brought to him resembled the figure 

 of a Sperm whale in the forty-second plate of Johnstone's 

 Historia Naturalis. I have not seen Johnstone's figure, but 

 Brandt and Ratzeburg* give a copy from Johnstone of the figure 

 I presume that Sibbald refers to. This shows the animal laid 

 on its back, and does not exhibit the high truncated head of 

 the Cachalot. One can easily see that Sibbald, in attempting 

 to construct the figure of the whale in this way, was placing 

 himself entirely at the discretion of his informant, who had been 

 in Greenland, and who, with the best intentions, might almost 

 unconsciously impart more or less his previous ideas of the form 

 of the Baleen whales, to the animal, partly buried in the mud, he 

 was trying to describe : and Sibbald, apparently knowing nothing 

 whatever of the shape of the Sperm whale, was completely at this 

 man's mercy. At any rate they managed between them to make 

 the figure of a Whale, with the lower jaw and teeth of a Cachalot, 

 which on the whole, barring the lower jaw, does not differ much 

 from the shape of the Balcena as given by Sibbald. What adds 

 to the likeness, he placed the blow-hole on the front of the head, 

 possible because Clusiust had previously done so in his Sperm 

 whales. From the account Sibbald received of these two whales, 

 he believed them to be specifically distinct from the common 

 Sperm whale, mainly, it would seem, because he was told that 

 each had a fin on its back ; his informant comparing the fin on 

 the Orkney animal to the mizen-mast of a ship. He was not 

 aware — indeed it was not known in his day — that the Sperm 

 whale had a hump on its back exactly, or nearly so, where he 

 places the dorsal fin on his whale. Had Sibbald known that 

 the Cachalot had such a hump, it is more than likely that he 

 would have at once suspected that this protuberance had been 

 mistaken for a dorsal fin by his informants. Clusius' description, 

 however, of the Cachalots stranded in Holland, in 1598 and 

 1 60 1, contained no notice of either a hump or dorsal fin, neither 

 had any other author recorded the fact, previous to Sibbald's 

 time, so far as I can learn. Indeed, this structure seems to 



* Medizinische Zoologia. + Exoticorum. 



