HUMPBACK WHALE. 289 



this New England whale in their lists of animals and it therefore forms the basis of their Latin 

 names. Thus Erxleben in 1777, and following him, Gmelin (1788) and Kerr (1792) confuse it 

 with the Scrag Wliale of Dudley, and include both under the name Balaena gibbosa. But 

 the Scrag Whale was doubtless Eubalaena glacialis, and the name if considered recognizable, 

 is a composite referring in part to both species. Although Fabricius, a Greenland missionary 

 and author of the Fauna Groenlandica (1780), was well acquainted with the species as it 

 occurred in the seas of southern Greenland, he considered it the same as Linne's Balaena boops, 

 and so refers to it in his work. As shown by True (1898, p. 624), however, this name was based 

 ou the young of the Common Finback. Nevertheless, this fact was not then appreciated, and 

 the specific name boops has been much used for the Humpback by later writers. Under this 

 name in 1818, Fabricius gives a very full account of the species as known to him. He also 

 introduced the name Keporkak by which the Greenland natives knew it, and this was subse- 

 quently used as a specific term for the species. Meanwhile, however, the Abbe Bonnaterre 

 in his treatise on Cetacea, published in 1789, definitely adopted the name Balaena nodosa, 

 basing his account on Dudley's Humpback, and giving as the known range "Nouvelle Angle- 

 terre." He cites other authors, who, as True points out, are Ukewise wholly indebted to the 

 same source. The name is therefore the first post-Linnean designation that can be un- 

 equivocally applied to a Humpback Wliale, and since True has shown that there is no ground 

 for distinguishing the whales of the two sides of the North Atlantic, it will stand as the tech- 

 nical name of the North Atlantic Humpback. In 1832 the German naturalist Rudolphi de- 

 scribed a specimen stranded at the mouth of the Elbe, and proposed for it the name Balaena 

 longimana in reference to the very long pectorals. This and Fabricius's contribution were the 

 first accurate memoirs on the species, so that it is barely a century since it may be said to have 

 been known to science. 



Although Brandt in 1845 made a subgenus Boops for this whale (preoccupied by Boops 

 Cuvier for a genus of fishes), and placed it in Lacepede's genus Balaenoptera, it was not until 

 1846 that the English naturalist J. E. Gray distinguished the Humpbacks as forming a distinct 

 genus from the other whalebone whales, by reason of the peculiarities of the skull and shoulder 

 blade, lack of a falcate dorsal fin, and particularly by the extraordinarily long pectorals. Hence 

 the generic title Megaptera (m'T^, large, and TTTepuf, a wing or flii)per) ; the specific name 

 nodosa refers of course to the irregular knobs on the head and hmbs. Eschricht, in 1849, 

 proposed Kyphobalaena as a group name for the Humpbacks, but this is antedated by Gray's 

 generic name. Van Beneden, nevertheless, used Kyphobalaena in a generic sense for the 

 Humpjjacks in several of his papers on Cetacea, and is thus responsible for sundry coml^inations 

 in which this name occurs. For Eschricht, although often quoted as author of the genus, 

 nowhere uses it so. Rudolphi's specific term longimana has long been current for the species; 

 but Gray in 1846 gave the name americana to a supposed distinct Humpback from Bermuda. 



