FIN-WHALES. 123 



and often stranded on some part of the English coast. The very 

 complete skeleton of a perfectly full-grown animal, 68 feet long 

 measured in a straight line, from the Moray Frith, Scotland, 

 where it was captured in 1882, shows extremely well the osteo- 

 logical characters of this group of Whales, even to the small pelvic 

 bone and rudimentary nodule representing the femur or thigh- 

 bone. The baleen or "whalebone^ is in place in the mouth, and 

 the flukes of the tail and the dorsal fin are also preserved, and 

 suspended near their original position. On the left side of the 

 room, near the windows, is the skeleton of a very young animal, 

 taken on the coast of North Wales in 1846, the different form of 

 the bones of which, owing to their incomplete development, caused 

 it formerly to be taken for a distinct species. 



Balanoptera borealis is a well-marked species, intermediate in 

 size between the last and the following. The skeleton exhibited is 

 from an animal taken near Goole in Yorkshire, in September 1884. 



A fourth species, not uncommon on the English coast, is the 

 small Balanoptera rostrata, which never reaches 30 feet in length. 

 Beside a skeleton from Greenland is another from New Zealand 

 (B. huttonii), which resembles it so closely that it is difficult to 

 assign any distinctive characters to it except the colour of the 

 whalebone, which, of a creamy white in the Northern, is almost 

 black in the Southern form. Much information is still required 

 before we can determine the limits of the geographical distribution 

 and variation of the various kinds of Whales, and more especially 

 do we need a larger number of specimens for study and comparison 

 before many important problems relating to their natural history 

 can be solved. 



