The Mammalian Fauna of the Edinburgh District. 157 
pp. 197-251). It was a female, measuring 78 feet 9 inches 
in length, and contained a male fcetus 19 feet 6 inches long. 
Its girth was estimated at 45 feet, and its weight at 74 tons. 
It yielded 16 tons of oil. | 
BALANOPTERA MUSCULUS (Z.). CoMMON RoRQUAL. 
In the Common Rorqual or Razorback we have another 
rare straggler to the district, no specimen having been 
identified, so far as I know, since 1848.1 The earlier writers 
did not distinguish between this and the last species, and 
in the volume on “ Whales” in the Naturalists’ Library, 
published in 1837, records clearly referable to each are 
brought together under the name of ‘Great Northern 
Rorqual.” Of the examples there mentioned, the following 
are now generally referred to the present species, namely— 
one 46 feet long, stranded in the Firth of Forth a little to the 
west of Burntisland on 17th November 1690, and described 
by Sibbald (“ Phalainologia,” p. 29); another, “precisely of 
equal size,” forced ashore very near to the same spot at 
Burntisland on 10th June 1761, and recorded by Neill 
(Memoirs of Wernerian Society, 1., 212) from a MS. account 
of it by Dr Walker; and a male, 43 feet long, stranded near 
Alloa, in the upper part of the estuary of the Forth, on 
23rd October 1808, and described by Neill (op. cité., i., 201). 
The only example since recorded seems to be the female, 
54 feet long, which was cast ashore near Kinkell, about 
- three miles east of St Andrews, on 8th January 1848, and 
described by the late Mr R. Walker (Scottish Naturalist, 
vol. i, p. 107). In connection with this occurrence, it is 
worth noting that another whale, said to be of this species, 
went ashore near Aberdeen on 18th December 1847. The 
Razorback stranded “ near Kingask, Fife, in 1848,” of which 
Sir William Turner has some of the baleen (Alston, Scottish 
1 Van Beneden, in his ‘‘ Histoire naturelle des Cétacés des mers d’Europe,” 
1889, speaks of an example in the Firth of Forth in April 1880, but the 
statement must, I fear, be one of the many inaccuracies which that work 
unfortunately contains, as no such occurrence is known to Sir William 
Turner, to whom I am indebted for valuable notes on this and allied species, 
