COMMON FINBACK WHALE. 205 



foundland whalemen told me that small foetuses could be obtained in the spiing, but that 

 gravid females taken in the fall had usually large foetuses nearly ready for birth. A single 

 young one is produced at a birth, though rarely there may be twins. I was informed by the 

 whalers at a Newfoundland station in 1903, of a female taken in Placentia Bay about Septem- 

 ber 4, 1903, in which two foetuses were found, each about twelve feet long. The two were said 

 to be a male and a female. Other cases of twins are known but are very rare. We are in 

 almost total ignorance of the manner and place of birth, but according to the Newfoundland 

 whalers, the females seek the quieter waters of the bays in fall and there bring forth the young. 

 At this season, they say, the females are very wild and difficult to approach. This may well be 

 the case, for all the six whales taken during my stay in mid-September at Placentia Bay were 

 males. The young at birth is nearly a quarter the length of its parent. True (1904) records 

 a female of G7 feet that contained a foetus 15 feet 2 inches long; she was captured off New- 

 foundland on August 15th. Slightly longer foetuses are recorded, but 18 feet is probably about 

 a maximum length. The baleen or whalebone is formed late in embryonic life and is not visible 

 in even fair-sized foetuses. Millais (1906) mentions one of seventeen feet in length in which 

 the baleen was just beginning to show in the gums. 



In the Museum of Comparative Zoology are the bones of a foetal Finback collected l)y 

 Mr. J. Henry Blake at Provincetown about the middle of June, 1881. The foetus could hardly 

 have been a yard in length when removed. I know of no authentic case of young Finbacks 

 being found on our coast. 



Range. 



The Finback Whale is cosmopolitan, and occurs in all the large oceans, but it is currently 

 supposed that the Finbacks of the Southern Ocean and those of the Pacific represent species 

 distinguishable from the Common Finback of the North Atlantic. The latter is limited in 

 its noi'thward range by the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean. In the summer, it advances to the 

 open seas about Spitzbergen, following the northeastern extension of warmer water. On the 

 western side of the Atlantic, however, it is uncommon much above Davis Straits, where in 

 summer it devours great numbers of small fish on the cod banks — probably capelin for the 

 most part. It apparently does not penetrate into Hudson Bay — at all events I have found 

 no record of it, — but may follow the open water in Baffin's Bay at least as far north as Melville ^ 

 Bay on the west coast of Greenland, where on June 9th, Lindsay (1911, p. 132) mentions seeing 

 a single one, as an unusual occurrence. It is said to be absent from the Newfoundland waters 

 from January to the last of May. . a n i l-^,„o^^ 



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