CETACEA. 3 



Fossiles,' examined the various documents and consulted the 

 authorities which had been used by Lacepede ; but he appears to 

 have undertaken the work with a predisposition to reduce the 

 number of species, which his predecessor had described, to the 

 smallest number. Thus, he concludes that there are only eleven 

 species of Dolphins, one Narwhal, one Hyperoodon, one Cachalot 

 or Sperm Whale; and he appears to think there are only two 

 Whalebone Whales the Right Whale and the Finner. To make 

 this reduction : first, he believes that the Hump-backed Whale of 

 Dudley is only a whale that has lost its fin, not recognizing that 

 the Cape Rorqual, which he afterwards described from the fine 

 skeleton now shown in the inner court of the Paris Museum, is 

 one of this kind ; secondly, that the Black-fish and the Sperm 

 Whale are the same species; an error which must have arisen 

 from his not having observed that Sibbald had figured the former, 

 for he accuses Sibbald of twice describing the Sperm Whale ; and 

 when he came to Schreiber's copy of Sibbald's figure, he thinks 

 the figure represents a Dolphin which had lost its upper teeth, 

 overlooking the peculiar form and posterior position of the dorsal 

 fin, and the shape of the head, which is unlike that of any known 

 Dolphin. This mistake is important, as it vitiates the greater part 

 of Cuvier's criticism on the writings of Sibbald, Artedi and others, 

 on these animals. Unfortunately these views have been very 

 generally adopted without re-examination. But, in making these 

 remarks, it is not with the least desire to underrate the great 

 obligation we owe to Cuvier for the papers above referred to ; 

 for it is to him that we are indebted for having placed the exa- 

 mination of the Whales on its right footing, and for directing 

 our inquiries into the only safe course on these animals, which 

 only fall in our way at distant periods, and generally under very 

 disadvantageous circumstances for accurate examination and 

 study. 



In 1828, Mr. F. J. Knox, the Conservator of the Museum of 

 the Old Surgeons' Hall in Edinburgh, published a Catalogue of 

 the Anatomical preparations of the Whale, in which he gives many 

 interesting details on the anatomy of the Balcena maximus and B. 

 minimus, which had been stranded near Edinburgh, of the foetus 

 of B. mysticetus from Greenland, and of Delphinus Tursio (D. leu- 

 copleurus), D. Delphis and Phoccena communis, Soosoo gangeticus, 

 and Halicore Indicus-, but the paper has been very generally 

 neglected or overlooked. 



M. F. Cuvier's ' Cetacea' (Paris, 1836) is little more than an 

 expansion of his brother's essays, with a compiled account of the 

 species ; but he has consulted with greater attention the works of 

 Sibbald and Dudley, has some doubts about the finned Cachalots 

 being the same as the Sperm Whale (p. 475), but at length gives 



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