CHAPTER VII. 



THE HUMPBACK, MEGAPTERA NODOSA (BONNATERRE). 



That a species of whale with very long pectoral limbs and with abdominal 

 ridges, or, in other words, a Humpback, occurred in European waters, was not 

 recognized by science until 1829, when Rudolph! read a paper before the Berlin 

 Academy of Sciences in which he described a specimen stranded in November, 1824, 

 at Vogelsand, at the mouth of the Elbe River (76). For this specimen Rudolphi 

 proposed the name Halcena longimana. 1 He was content to leave the species in 

 the Linnean genus Balcena, and it was not until 1845 that the Humpbacks were 

 regarded as constituting a separate group. In that year Brandt established for 

 them the subgenus Boops, distinguished by the single character "pectoral elon- 

 gate." ; This name is preoccupied by Hoops Cuvier, 1817 (fishes). In 1846 Gray 

 renamed the genus Megaptera s and enumerated its principal characters (56, 16). 



In Eschricht's list of whales stranded on the European coasts (37, 176) only 

 two specimens are recorded between 1824 and 1846, a period of twenty-two years. 

 Van Beneden (7) records very few others up to 1889. This is somewhat remarkable, 

 as Cocks's statistics of the Finmark whaling stations show a considerable number 

 of Humpbacks captured, aggregating from 40 to 100 annually. 



Although the European Humpback was unknown to science until 1824, Ameri- 

 can species were described at a much earlier date and were introduced into zoological 

 nomenclature by Fabricius under the name of Bcdcena loops in 1780, 4 and by Bon- 

 naterre under the name Balcena nodosa in 1789. Bonnaterre's species was founded 

 on Dudley's description of the Humpback whale of New England waters. Fabricius's 

 species was based on his own observations in Greenland. 



In this case, as the American species (or one of them, if there are several) was 

 named first, the question to be considered is whether the European species is to be 

 regarded as a synonym. With the Finback whales the case is the reverse, the 

 European species having been named first. 



The fullest information regarding the European Humpback is to be found in 



1 Van Beneden (7, 121) mentions one having been stranded near Greifswald, March, 1545, 

 another on the coast of Courland in May, 1578, and a third near Stettin in 1628. I have not found 

 the sources from which Van Beneden derived knowledge of these specimens. 



a BRANDT in Tchihatcheff's Voyage Sci. dans 1' Altai Oriental. Paris, 1845. 4. 



"Annals and Mag. Nat. Hist., 17, Feb., 1846, p. 83. 



* Preoccupied by Bal&na boops Linnaeus, 1758. 



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