THE WHALEBONE WHALES OF THE WESTERN NORTH ATLANTIC. 943 
American sources, until the time of Rudolphi’s description of J. longimana in 
1832. This author suspected that his species might be the same as Fabricius’s 
boéps, and Schlegel in 1844 was of the same opinion. 
In 1848 Eschricht arrived at the same conclusion from an opposite point of 
view, and in 1849 stated emphatically: “It is now raised beyond all doubt that the 
whale stranded in the mouth of the Elbe River in 1824, and described by Rudolphi 
as Balena longimana, is nothing more and nothing less than an individual of the 
commonest species of baleen whale on the Greenland coast, known to the Green- 
landers as the Heporkak ; also mentioned by Anderson under the latter name and 
introduced into systematic zodlogy by Klein and Bonnaterre under the appropriate 
name Balena nodosa” (87,57). As this latter name is derived from the descrip- 
tion of the New England Humpback, Eschricht combines not only the Greenland 
and European Humpbacks but those of the coast of the United States as well, in one 
species. Gray, however, was not content to have it so, and already, in 1846, sepa- 
rated the “Bermuda Humpback” under the name of Megaptera americana (56). 
In 1866 he still adhered to this arrangement, employing the name JZ. americana as 
before and citing Fabricius’s Balena bodps with a mark of interrogation, under J. 
longimana, with the comment: “ Rudolphi, and after him Schlegel, refer B. bodps, 
O. Fabricius, to this species; and Professor Eschricht has no doubt that Balena 
bodps of O. Fabricius is intended for this species, as it is called Keporkak by the 
Greenlanders. If this be the case, Fabricius’s description of the form and position 
of the dorsal fin and the position of the sexual organs is not correct” (53, 124), 
Gray seems not to have known at this time of Cope’s description of JZ. osphyia, 
published in 1865. In the supplement to his catalogue he quotes Cope’s description, 
but without comment. 
In 1869, Van Beneden and Gervais remark as regards osphyia and bodps (= 
longimana): “ We do not find any difference of value for separating them” (8, 236). 
and again in 1889 Van Beneden unites all the American Humpbacks in one species. 
Fischer (44, 58), who studied the Humpback bones from Martinique Id. in 
the Bordeaux museum, which should presumably represent JZ. bellicosa, was unable 
to decide whether they should be assigned to the same species as the Greenland 
Humpback, and closes his investigation with the inquiry whether all the Humpbacks 
should not be regarded as belonging to a single species. 
Nore.—Two excellent illustrations of the Newfoundland Humpback, from negatives obtained by Mr. Wm. 
Palmer, of the U. S. National Museum, in 1903, are reproduced on plate 38, figs. 1 and 2. The individual represented 
in fig. I is unusually white and on that account especially interesting. 
