Sir E. Home on the Tusks of the Narwhale, 127 



the generally received opinion of the captains in the Green- 

 land fishery, that the males had one tusk, and the females 

 none ; and as I imagined that I had cleared up a part of the 

 natural history of this species of whale, which had hitherto 

 been involved in obscurity, I proceeded to lay these obser- 

 vations before the Society. After I had done so, I found 

 so many contradictory accounts among my friends, that I be- 

 came staggered what to believe : some had seen two tusks 

 of different lengths in the same skull, others believed they 

 had seen two of the same length. To set the question at rest, 

 my friend Mr. Brown, Librarian to Sir Joseph Banks, took 

 the trouble of collecting all the books in Sir Joseph's library, 

 in which the subject is mentioned. In Anderson's Description 

 of Iceland, Greenland, and Davis's Straits, it is mentioned 

 that, in 1684, Dick Peterson brought to Hamburgh the skull 

 of a female narwhale with two tusks, the left sqwqw feet five 

 inches, the right seven feet long, and that this skull had ever 

 since been preserved there, and shewn to the curious. This 

 account is copied by several later authors. 



I found also, in Tycho L. Tychonius, an account, published 

 in 1706, of a narwhale's skull with the left tusk seven feet 

 long, and the right imbedded and completely concealed in the 

 substance of the skull, nine Danish inches in length. The 

 author takes some merit, and in my opinion deservedly, for 

 having discovered it. A drawing of it in situ is annexed. 



This information set me to work in sawing the skulls in 

 the HuNTERiAN collection, to ascertain whether they con- 

 tained rudiments of tusks not yet protruded from the sub- 

 stance of the bone, and the result of this investigation explains, 

 in the most satisfactory manner, every thing that I have seen 



