called " Steypirey^ " hy the Icelanders, 339 



his description witli a drawing, and that the fin itself which 

 Moller had sent him has not been preserved. 



If tlie result I think we have come to is correct, EschricM s 

 ^^ Tunnolik^'' the '^ Steypirey^r'''' of the Icelanders ^ and^ finally^ 

 the whale described hy Malm are only one and the same species j 

 which appears to be one of the most common in our northern 

 seas, and the systematic name of which must be Balcenoptera 

 Sihhaldii^ . If, contrary to expectation, it should appear, 

 after all, that B. Carolince is different, I do not think it pos- 

 sible, from the materials now available, to state with cer- 

 tainty whether the " Tunnolik " in that case must rather be 

 referred to the one or to the other of these two species ; but, 

 as I have said, there is scarcely any fear that this question wiU 

 be raised. 



I have still to add some measurements taken by Capt. 

 Bottemann, apparently with very great care, of the male 

 foetus of the " SteypireySr " mentioned before in this notice. 

 He has been kind enough to send these to the Museum at 



* In his elaborate Monograpli of the jBalesnoptera Carolmfs, p. xxi, 

 Malm alludes to the possibility that his whale might be identical with 

 £. Sibbaldii, remarking that, even if it were so (which, however, he 

 denies), he could not use the name Sibbaldii, because *'it has already 

 been used by Neill in 1808 for another fin-whale, Musculus Sibbaldii, 

 Neill." This, however, is a complete misunderstanding, which shows 

 that Malm cannot have seen, much less read, Neill's paper on the whale 

 stranded near the town of Alloa, but must have quoted at second hand 

 from Eschricht's Schema A, in his sixth essay upon the Cetaceans (K. D. 

 Vidensk. Selsk. Skrifter, ser. 5. vol. i. p. iii), or perhaps from the corre- 

 sponding schema in the same author's ' Zoolog. Untersuchungen iiber die 

 nordischen Wallthiere.' It is true that the whale was stranded in 1808; 

 but Neill's paper was not read in the Wemerian Society till 1809, and 

 not printed till 1811 ; and then, Neill does not give the AUoa whale any 

 new name, but considers it to be the same species as that which was 

 stranded in 1690 on Burntisland, and which Sibbald, in his ^Pha- 

 lainologia Nova ' (ed. 2, p. 69), thought to be identical with the Muscultis 

 of Pliny. Purposing to point out, in the schema mentioned above, the 

 specific identity between the Alloa whale andSibbald's '' JSalcsna tripinnis 

 qum rostrum acutnm habet,^^ Eschricht has briefly expressed this in the 

 words " Muscidus Sibbaldii,'''' or the whale denot d by Sibbald as " Mus- 

 cnlus;^^ and this denomination was not understood by Malm. Of course 

 it is not my intention to reproach Malm in the least for having been unable 

 to examine the paper of Patrick Neill ; but I think it would have been 

 more correct to have stated expressly that his was a second-hand quota- 

 tion. And even if Malm had never seen the notice in question, he would, 

 by a more judicious use of the remaining zoological literature, have been 

 saved from falling into the singular mistake that Neill had in 1808 

 established a fin-whale genus Muscidus and a fin-whale species Musculus 

 Sibbaldii. 



24* 



