234 ALLEN: NEW ENGLAND WHALEBONE WHALES. 



Balaenoptera borealis LESSON. 



RUDOLPHI'S RORQUAL; POLLACK WHALE. 



PLATE 13, FIG. 1. 



SYNONYMY. 



1822. Balaena rostmta Rudolphi, Abhandl. K. Akad. Wiss. Berlin, for 1820-21, p. 27-40, pi. 1-5 (not of 

 Miiller, 1776; not of Fabricius, 1780). 



1828. Balaenoptera borealis Lesson, Hist. Nat. Gen. et Partic. des Mamm. et des Oiseaux, Cetaces, p. 342, 



pi. 12. 



1829. Balaena borealis Fischer, Synopsis Mammalium, p. 524 (in part). 



1846. Balaenoptera laticeps Gray, Zool. Voyage Erebus and Terror, Mammalia, p. 20. 



1847. Balaena physalus Nilsson, Skandinavisk Fauna, pt. 1, p. 636 (in part). 

 1864. Sibbaldus laticeps Gray, Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1864, p. 223. 

 1864. Sibbaldius laticeps Flower, Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1864, p. 393. 

 1864. Phy -solus laticeps Flower, Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1864, p. 395. 



1868. Rudolphius laticeps Gray, Synopsis of Species of Whales and Dolphins British Museum, p. 3; Suppl. 

 Cat. Seals and Whales British Museum, 1871, p. 54. 



t 



History and Nomenclature. 



The first accurate account of this little-known whale was published in 1822 by Rudolphi 

 who, however, supposed it to be the same species as Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata. His illustrated 

 paper gives details of the structure, under the name Balaena rostrata, of an individual taken in 

 1819 in the North Sea, and preserved in the Berlin Museum. Six years later, Lesson (1828) 

 in his supplement to Buffon's works on natural history bestowed on it the name Balaenoptera 

 borealis which it still retains, basing his account primarily on Cuvier's description (copied from 

 Rudolphi) of the North Sea skull and partly on some notes supplied him by a French officer 

 of the Health Department, concerning a specimen stranded on the Isle of Oleron, west coast 

 of France. In 1846, J. E. Gray in his classic review of the whales (in the Zoology of the Voyage 

 of the Erebus and Terror) recognized that Rudolphi's monograph was concerned with another 

 species than that to which the name rostrata rightly applied, and he therefore renamed it Ba- 

 laenoptera laticeps, ignoring Lesson's previous application of the name borealis. In 1864, he 

 placed the species in his genus Sibbaldus which he erected to include this whale and the Sul- 

 phurbottom (to which he as well as several other naturalists wrongly applied the specific name 

 borealis). Flower uses this name emended to Sibbaldius laticeps, but in the same paper (per- 

 haps through inadvertence) uses also Physalus laticeps, and calls attention to the fact that 

 laticeps is somewhat of a misnomer. Four years later, in 1868, Gray proposed for it a separate 



