306 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XXIV, 



nal parts, and of the skull and various other portions of the skeleton, much 

 information is given regarding the vertebral column, pectoral limb, sturnum, 

 scapula, vertebrae, etc., which parts are illustrated by text figures. There 

 is also a figure of a model 1 of the adult specimen, carefully made from the 

 animal by James L. Clark, animal modeler at this Museum, which is doubt- 

 less the most accurate representation of the external form of this species yet 

 published. 



III. RELATIONSHIPS AND NOMENCLATURE. 



Relationships. As already shown (antea, pp. 281-288) the whalers of the 

 early part of the seventeenth century recognized the Arctic or Greenland 

 Right Whale, when they first met with it in the Spitzbergen seas, as a very 

 different animal from the Right Whale that for several centuries had been 

 the foundation of the whale-fishery of the temperate North Atlantic, and it 

 was on the basis their crude comparisons of the two species in the annals of 

 their craft that they were recognized as distinct by the systematists of the 

 eighteenth century. Later, however, Cuvier united them as a single species, 

 owing to the absence of specimens of the more southern form, and influenced 

 largely by the opinion of Scoresby (see antea, p. 289), whose personal knowl- 

 edge of the subject was confined to the Right Whale of the Arctic seas. 

 Eschricht, from his study of the literature became convinced that the 

 North Atlantic and the Greenland animals not only differed widely in their 

 general conformation, but occupied distinct geographic areas. He had not 

 then seen a specimen of the North Atlantic species, and when he later had 

 opportunity to study the now famous San Sebastian specimen, he was able 

 to announce that it not only represented a species distinct from the Green- 

 land Whale, but one that was not at all nearly related to it, it much more 

 closely resembling Balcena australis of the southern hemisphere. Unfortu- 

 nately the publication of his memoir on this specimen was prevented by his. 

 death, and the osteological characters of the species remained undescribed 

 till nearly twenty years later, when a second representative of it was cap- 

 tured in the Mediterranean, and its external and osteological characters- 

 were described and illustrated by Capellini in 1877 and by Gasco in 1878. 

 In the meantime, however, it had received wide recognition in the literature 

 of zoology under the name Balcena biscayensis. 



In 1864, J. E. Gray 3 proposed to separate the Right W 7 hales into two 

 generic groups, retaining in Balcena only B. mysticetus Linn., arid founding 



1 Ihe scale given in the title to this illustration, " 1 inch to 1 foot," relates to the model and 

 not to the animal. The model is about -ft natural size (linear). 



2 Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1864, pp. 199-201. 



