JANUARY 9 



They were not large, as whales go, measuring only 

 between twenty and thirty feet in length, with short 

 blunt muzzles, black above and white below, the 

 characteristic fin standing three or four feet above 

 the back. Mr. Wilson assigns this new whale to the 

 Mystacoceti the baleen or whalebone group of cetaceans 

 and considers that it will prove to constitute a new 

 genus. 



It is to our grief that Sir William Flower is no 

 longer among us to share the interest in this discovery. 

 Deep and catholic as was his affection for all living 

 creatures, he made the whales his peculiar care, and 

 sorrowfully foresaw their approaching extinction. 



' For countless centuries (he said in a lecture to the Royal 

 Institution in 1883), impulses from within and the force of 

 circumstances from without have been gradually shaping the 

 whales into their present wonderful form and gigantic size ; 

 but the very perfection of their structure and their magnitude 

 combined, the rich supply of oil protecting their internal 

 parts from cold, the beautiful apparatus of whalebone by 

 which their nutrition is provided for, have been fatal gifts, 

 which, under the sudden revolution produced on the surface 

 of the globe by the development of the wants and arts of 

 civilised man, cannot but lead in a few years to their partial, 

 if not complete, extinction.' 



While Sir William Flower held that the evidence 

 was ' absolutely conclusive ' that whales represent the 

 adaptation of a terrestrial mammal to an aquatic 

 existence, he was equally firmly convinced that they 

 are not descended, like seals and walruses, from the 

 Carnivores, but that they exhibit affinities with the 

 Ungulates. True that none of the cetaceans are 



