Aquatic Mammals 241 



to possess all kinds of medicinal virtues, 

 sharing the rhinoceros' horns reputation 

 as a detector of poison. These large 

 whales, which are on the verge of ex- 

 tinction, were once so common that their 

 tusks were used by Icelanders as scaffold- 

 ing poles for their huts. 



The poverty of our knowledge as 

 regards the distribution of whales was 

 well illustrated in December, 1927, when 

 a shoal of 120 False Killers were stranded 

 off the coast of Ross-shire, as the result of 

 severe gales. The bodies were roughly 

 skeletonised and together with the heads 

 conveyed to the Natural History Museum 

 at South Kensington, at a cost of about 

 500. The heads were immortalised in 

 plaster casts and with the skeletons be- 

 longing to them distributed amongst the 

 museums of the world. The False Killer 

 (Pseudorca crassidens) , which was first 

 made known to science by the discovery 

 of a skull dug up in the Lincolnshire Fens, 



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