LITTLE PIKED WHALE. 259 



opinion. Linne himself had no knowledge of it, nor was it until 1780, when Fabricius's Fauna 

 ( Irornlandica appeared, that it was characterized under the name of Balaena rostrata. Fabri- 

 cins describes its small size, whitish whalebone, and even the pinkish tinge to the white of the 

 belly and throat, but curiously, he makes no mention of the very conspicuous white mark on 

 the pectoral limb. But Fabricius in calling it Balaena rostrata or beaked whale, did not know 

 that the species to which this name had been applied by Muller in 1776, was not a whalebone 

 whale, but a ziphioid the Bottle-nosed Whale (Hyperoodon) . In 1787, the English ana- 

 tomist Hunter gave some account of his dissection of a Little Piked Whale killed in the North 

 Sea, but it was not till 1803 that a tenable specific name was given it by Lac6pede acuto- 

 rostrata, in reference to its pointed head, of which, however, his conception, drawn from 

 descriptions and figures, was rather exaggerated. He placed the species in his genus Balae- 

 noptera, from which it was later removed by Fischer in 1829, who in his compilation of the 

 species of mammals then known, made it with some question, a variety of his "Balaena 

 borealis," (Balaena borealis f y rostrata). Cuvier in 1836, erected the genus Rorqualus, and 

 under R. boops included this whale. In 1837, Jardine corrected this to Rorqualus minor and 

 DeKay, in 1842, following Cuvier's use of the generic term, again applied Fabricius's specific 

 name in the combination Rorqualus rostratus. Gray, in 1846, used the name in combination 

 with Lac6pede's genus Balaenoptera, and he has been followed by many later writers. Three 

 years afterward, Eschricht included it in his genus Pterobalaena, now recognized as a synonym 

 of Balaenoptera, and revived "minor" as the specific name. 



A specimen from Sweden was described in 1845 by Rasch under the new name Balaenop- 

 tera eschrichtii, but the characters claimed were not of specific value. 



Still another combination, Balaenoptera minima, was proposed by Flower in 1864, reviving 

 Knox's Balaena minima, a name overlooked by most systematists, as it appeared in trinomial 

 form in a separately published paper in 1828. 



Cope's apocryphal species, Balaena gibbosa, or as he in the same paper proposed to call 

 it, Agaphelus gibbosus, appears to have been in part at least, this same species (see True, 1904, 

 p. 105) . The genus Agaphelus, however, seems to have been founded on a misconception and 

 is no longer recognized. 



In 1877, Capellini, an Italian naturalist, published an account of a specimen of the Little 

 Piked Whale stranded on the Italian coast of the Adriatic, giving it the new name Sibbaldius 

 iiicnilinii, which Trouessart has corrected to Balaenoptera mondini. This was relegated to 

 the synonymy a few years later. Finally Thomas and True, in 1898, both called formal at- 

 tention to the fact that Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata of Lace"pede is the correct systematic name 

 for the species. Whether or not the representatives of the Little Piked Whale in the Southern 

 and the Pacific Oceans are identical with the North Atlantic species, it is as yet impossible to 

 tell with certainty, though the probabilities are that they are not specifically different. Until 



