284 ALLEN: NEW ENGLAND WHALEBONE WHALES. 



Indians] with food ready cooked. To facilitate the catching these fish, he threw many large 

 stones, at proper distances, into the sea, [these formed the Elizabeth Islands] on which he 



might walk with greater ease to himself When the Christian religion took place in the 



island, he told them, as light had come among them, and he belonged to the kingdom of 

 darkness, he must take his leave; which, to their great sorrow, he accordingly did; and has 

 never been heard of since." 



Age of the Fossils. 



How long ago these ancient whales lived in the waters off our coast is in large part a matter 

 of conjecture. Geologists have made a number of calculations, based on the known or esti- 

 mated rates of deposit and erosion, in an endeavor to arrive at some idea of the age of the 

 Tertiary deposits. The Miocene strata at Gay Head, it is believed, were laid down perhaps 

 two million years ago — certainly a vast lapse of time. Yet the vertebral bones of these whales 

 are hardly to be differentiated from those of living species. But this is perhaps less to be 

 wondered at, since whales breed slowly and have usually but one young at a birth, so that 

 opportunity for the evolution and transmission of differential characters is decreased. 



Miocene Conditions. 



Of the habits and nature of this extinct Rorqual we can only conjecture. According to 

 Dall (Maryland Geol. Surv., Miocene, 1904, p. cxlii), a comparison of the fossil moUusks from 

 the deposits of this period shows that they comprised for the most part species characteristic 

 of more boreal waters than those of the earhest Tertiary times that preceded. "Some modi- 

 fication of the coast line or sea-bottom, supposedly in the vicinity of the Carolinas or possibly 

 connected with the elevation of the Antilles, diverted the warm currents corresponding to the 

 present Gulf Stream so far off-shore in the early part of the Miocene as to permit of the invasion 

 of the southern coast lines by a current of cold water from the north, bringing with it its appro- 

 priate fauna and driving southward or exterminating the pre-existent subtropical marine 

 fauna of these shores. This resulted in the most marked faunal change which is revealed by 

 the fossil faunas of the Atlantic coast of America subsequent to the Cretaceous. A cool-tem- 

 perate fauna for the time replaced the subtropical one normal to these latitudes, and has left 

 its traces on the margin of the continent from Martha's Vineyard Island in Massachusetts 

 south to Fort Worth inlet in East Florida, and westward to the border of the then existing 

 Mississippi embayment. This seems to have been the limit of effectual invasion by the north- 

 ern marine fauna." 



Probably then, these Balaenopterae lived in the moderately cool waters of the Miocene 

 seas, much as we now see their modern relatives off Newfoundland. How far to the south 



