MAMMALS 



The generally recognized British mammal fauna of the present day com- 

 prises seventy-three species, of which, excluding the domesticated mammals, 

 Lancashire has forty-seven representatives. The most notable absentees occur 

 among the Cheiroptera and the Cetacea, and of the sixteen species of the former 

 admitted into the British list, seven have so far been recorded for the county. 

 Among the unregistered species, however, the hairy-armed bat (Pterygistes 

 leisleri] and the whiskered bat (Myotis mystacinus), whose range has 

 been recorded as extending to the ' Lake District,' without specifically 

 mentioning any locality in Lancashire, will almost certainly be yet discovered 

 within our limits when the bats have been more numerously collected and 

 more carefully identified in the northern part of the shire. Of the remain- 

 ing species of bats three are doubtfully British, and four are confined to the 

 south of England. Of the unrecorded cetaceans four are unknown to have 

 visited the western coasts of Britain ; one, Risso's grampus (Grampus griseus), 

 is a very rare visitor to our seas ; and the other two, the black-fish (Globi- 

 cephalus me/as) and the lesser rorqual (Baleenoptera acufo-rostrata), will in all 

 probability, from their known wide range, be yet recorded as Lancashire 

 visitants. Indeed, among the remains of various animals found in the excava- 

 tions on the margin of the Ribble for the Preston Docks, no fewer than three 

 skulls of the black-fish were discovered, besides the jaw-bone of a right whale 

 (Balcena mysticetus) and the skulls of a porpoise and of a species of grampus. 

 The most remarkable cetacean on our list is the great hump-backed whale, 

 which, venturing into the Mersey in 1863, became stranded so far from the 

 sea as the mud flats near to Speke Hall. 



The only other group in which Lancashire falls short of the full tale of 

 English species is the Carnivora, in which no representative of the ringed seal 

 (Pboca hispida) has yet been met with ; nor, indeed, has the species been 

 recorded from the shores of any western county of England. 



The enormous and increasing sandbanks fringing the whole coast line 

 from Cumberland to the mouth of the Dee are loaded with rich molluscan 

 and ophiuroid deposits, and the waters overflowing them teem with polyzoa, 

 crustaceans, and fish-fry. These sandbanks are just the localities towards which 

 cetaceans and marine carnivores would be attracted ; and doubtless these 

 unsupervised areas are visited by species of both groups, during their migrations, 

 far oftener than can be observed from the shore. 



The ceaseless extension of the boundaries of our towns and cities ; the 

 increase of chemical and other industries which invade with their fatal 

 fumes ever broadening tracts of country ; the continous reduction by drainage 

 of the mosses and meres which in Lancashire were once (and even yet are) so 



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