136 GREAT NORTHERN RORQUAL. 



bouring coast. The person who finds it imme- 

 diately gives notice, and those who w r ere engaged 

 in the hunt come and identify their property hy 

 their name or mark on the instruments employed. 

 The finder is then rewarded with a third of the 

 booty, to which he is hy law entitled, whilst the 

 remainder is shared among the rest. (Travels in 

 Norway, 300). 



As herring and other fish are the occasional if 

 not habitual food of the Rorqual, and as these often 

 resort to the estuaries of our rivers and the enclosed 

 and shallow bays of our coasts, where they are keenly 

 pursued by the w r hales, it not unfrequently happens 

 that even these immense monsters are taken by 

 surprise, left by the retiring tide, and stranded on 

 the shore. A curious fact is on record with regard 

 to one individual, seventy-eight feet long, who had 

 been for long a keen hunter, and was at last sur- 

 prised and cast away. The circumstance, as nar- 

 rated by Sir Robert Sibbald in his Phalainologia, 

 took place at Abercorn in the Frith of Forth in 

 September 1692. This individual had been for 

 twenty years known to the fishermen from its pur- 

 suit and capture of herring, and had been termed by 

 them " the hollie pike" because there was a hole in 

 its dorsal fin, which had been produced by a musket 

 ball, and therefore supplied a very distinguishing 

 mark. Its death was considered by them as a 

 subject of great joy. It has also been frequently 

 observed, that on an exposed coast, after a great 



