204 WHALES AND WHALE FISHERIES xiv 



all the qualities which render it of special value, in the 

 oil of an allied but much smaller species of whale, the 

 bottlenose (Hyperoodon), which has consequently become the 

 object of a regular fishery in the North Sea, especially by the 

 Norwegians. 



Let me now return to the whales of the Basques, the North 

 Atlantic right whale. It is a singular fact that its existence 

 was quite overlooked by naturalists till lately, all accounts of 

 it which are to be found in the numerous records of European 

 whale fishing having been attributed to the Greenland whale, 

 which was supposed by Cuvier, for instance, to have had 

 formerly a much wider distribution than now, and to have 

 been driven by the persecution of man to its present circum- 

 polar haunts. To the two Danish naturalists Eschricht and 

 Reinhardt is due the credit of having proved its existence as 

 a distinct species from a careful collation of numerous historical 

 notices of its structure, distribution, and habits, and, although 

 they were at one time disposed to think that the species had 

 become extinct, they were able to show that this was not the 

 case, an actual specimen having been captured in the harbour 

 of San Sebastian in January 1854, the skeleton of which 

 Eschricht was fortunate enough to secure for the Copenhagen 

 Museum. More recently other specimens have been captured 

 on the Spanish coast, the Mediterranean, North America, and 

 Norway. A skeleton has fortunately been secured for the 

 British Museum, the exhibition of which is only delayed by 

 the want of a proper room in which it can be mounted. In 

 the North Pacific a very similar if not identical whale is 

 regularly hunted by the Japanese, who tow the carcasses 

 ashore for the purpose of flensing and extracting the 

 whalebone. In the tropical seas, according to Captain 

 Maury's whale charts, right whales are never or rarely seen, 

 but when the southern temperate seas were explored, they 

 were found to be abundantly inhabited by right whales 

 called "black whales," so closely similar in character to the 

 Atlantic and Japanese species that, although described and 

 named as if distinct, at present no satisfactory and constant 

 characters have been pointed out by which they can be 

 separated. Of course this may arise from our very imperfect 



