146 The Scottish JVatura/ist. 



came nearest, in this respect, that of his Limekilns Cetacean. 

 However this may be, in his History of Fife after noticing the 

 Sperm whales he goes on to state that " There is another sort 

 of them, which I take to be the Orca very Plinii, it hath big 

 teeth in the lower jaw, and small teeth in the interstices 

 betwixt the cases, which receive into them the great teeth of 

 the lower jaw. One of these stranded above Cramond-Inch. It 

 was but fifty and some odd feet long ; I take it to have been a 

 young one. Both these mentioned had spouts in their fore- 

 heads, by which they threw up w r ater," &c. This is beyond 

 doubt the description of a Cachalot, if not the identical individual 

 at Cramond already noticed, and if Sibbald had examined these 

 whales himself he must have observed that the spouts were not 

 on the forehead, but on the anterior edge of the truncated snout. 

 The Orca of Pliny is the Orca of the present day, although in 

 justice to Sibbald, it may be stated that Cinder thought that 

 the Orca taken in the port of Ostia, and which Claudius attack- 

 ed, was a Cachalot. It is now known that the Cachalot does 

 not pursue and kill either Whales or Seals, and that it would 

 not be attracted by hides, its food being almost confined to 

 cephalopods. I do not mean in this, to underrate in the least 

 the attainments and labours of Sibbald in this difficult depart- 

 ment of Zoology. He was one of the pioneers of science, and 

 did good work in his day. ' Had his descriptions been taken 

 for what they were worth, and estimated according to the know- 

 ledge of the subject that existed, in the age in which they were 

 written, bearing in mind, at the same time, the source from 

 which he received his information, there would, perhaps, have 

 been fewer discrepancies in zoological literature. As it was, 

 however, all the whales he described, "whose great heads always 

 contain spermaceti," were admitted into the Linnean system 

 as distinct species by Artead, to whom Linnaeus entrusted the 

 arrangement of the cetaceans and fishes. Artead divided the 

 whales of this kind into two genera, Physeter and Cotodon, the 

 former embracing those of Sibbald, with dorsal fins, the latter 

 the finless kinds. Linnaeus changed this arrangement afterwards, 

 and united these two genera into one, under the name Physeter. 

 They then stood thus : — P. cotodon, containing Sibbald's 102 small 

 Orkney whales; P. macrocephalus, the true Sperm whale as 

 then understood ; P. microps, Sibbald's Limekilns animal ; 



