1903 Coast Museums and Zoological Treasures 295 



must be worth keeping, and it has decided to keep its 

 tortoise. 



Scarborough was not the point from which my tour of 

 the coast started, and I had first to visit Whitby and to 

 see the fossil saurian, or "alienator" {Tclcosaurus), as it was 

 described at the time of its discovery in the Upper Lias of 

 the neighbouring cliffs some hundred and fifty years ago. 

 It must have been a fearsome playmate on the foreshore 

 in its day, and aboriginal bathers, desiring to wash off the 

 old coat of woad, must have gazed anxiously up and down 

 that serried coastline for signs of the enemy. The authorities 

 have placed the skull of a Ganges gavial handy for purposes 

 of comparison. Whitby, which has always been as famous 

 for fossils as for its now neglected jet, has other valuable 

 extinct saurians in the museum, while another specimen 

 sure to attract attention is a well - stuffed ribbon - fish, 

 probably 8 or 10 feet long (I took no actual measurement), 

 which was washed up on the beach a little to the north- 

 ward. 



At Hull one finds the first really important museum. 

 Lately taken over by the corporation from a local scientific 

 society, and placed under a very able energetic curator in 

 Mr. Thomas Sheppard, F.L.S., the Hull Museum, though 

 many leading residents have never troubled to visit its 

 halls, is a credit even to so important a city. If one were 

 asked to pick out the characteristic animal groups in so 

 varied and representative a collection, I think the whales, 

 seals, and polar bears would take precedence. The ex- 

 planation is easily found, for Hull played a great part in 

 the brave old whaling days, and many a treasure from the 

 icy north thus found a permanent resting - place in the 

 society's museum. This accounts for the valuable collec- 

 tion of lances and harpoons, and Hull can afford to call 

 them relics of her vanished whale fisheries without a pang, 

 since other equally profitable fisheries now engage all her 

 capital and labour. In whales the museum has a nice 

 choice, one of them being a foetus of 2 or 3 inches long, 

 which now hangs in a bottle of preservative. Yet the most 

 valuable of all the museum's whales cannot in any sense 

 be regarded as a relic of the whaling days, since it was, in 



VOL. II. NO. 8. U 



