Sir E. Home on the Tusks of the Naruuhale. 129 



left tusk appears commonly long before the right one, wliich 

 corresponds with the accounts given by the captains employed 

 in the Greenland fishery. One of these captains, who has 

 been thirty-five voyages, informed me that he never saw a 

 male narwhale with two tusks, except once from the mast head ; 

 the animal was rising out of the water, the left tusk was about 

 six feet above the surface, and the point of the right tusk just 

 out of the water, so that it appeared to him one-third the length 

 of the left. 



In the skull of the female sent me by Mr. Scoresby, the 

 sutures are more united than in the smallest of the males 

 which I have described ; there is no appearance whatever of 

 tusks externally, but both on the right and left side there is 

 an orifice in the bone, and when the skull was cut into, two 

 small milk tusks were discovered of the same size and ap- 

 pearance, and exactly resembling those described in the male ; 

 they were eight inches long, and the points were only two 

 inches and a quarter from the front of the skull, lying in a 

 canal, of which the external opening was the orifice, so that 

 they were nearer getting into the gum than those of either of 

 the males ; and there can be no doubt that the permanent 

 tusks, which were to follow them, would be of equal lengths, 

 or nearly so throughout their growth, as they were found to 

 be in the skull at Hamburgh. We learn also, from this spe- 

 cimen, that the tusks in the female come much later than in 

 the male, which explains the error the captains of the Green- 

 land ships have been led into, of the females having no 

 tusks. 



Female skulls, with full grown tusks, must be rarely met 

 with, since the only well authenticated account upon record 



MDCCCXIIl. S 



