NOTES AND QUERIES. 



3«3 



children, but hud disappeared for a period of eight or nine months, returned 

 to her early home. The children gathered eagerly round their lost favourite, 

 caressing her and hastening to decorate her slender neck with the insignia 

 of a blue ribbon. The wilder mate, which had accompanied the truant part 

 of the way, kept watch in a covert about two hundred yards distant, 

 awaiting the return of his partner with evident concern. — H. A. Macpherson 

 (Trans. Cumber!, and Westmorl. Assoc. Lit. and Sci., 1887, p. 44), 



[The Roe was abundant in Cumberland during the reign of Charles I., 

 when a number (31) were transported from the woods around Naworth Castle 

 to the royal park at Wimbledon. An account of the transportation will be 

 found in Harting's ' Essays on Sport and Natural History,' pp. 47, 48. 

 —Ed.] 



The Grampus or Killer on the Coast of Norway.— I am indebted 

 to Professor Flower for the inspection of a photograph of a Grampus, or 

 Killer, Orca gladiator (Lacepede), which was captured on February 26th, 

 1885, at Bildoen, a small island about 15 English miles west of Bergen. 

 Extraordinary to relate, no less than sixty-two of these animals were 

 captured at the same time in this Fjord, and the photograph before me, 

 representing one of the largest males, was taken on the spot immediately 

 after capture by a photographer of Bergen. The precise dimensions have 

 not been forwarded, but as the length of the animal in the photograph is 

 about nine inches, one is easily enabled to judge of its proportions. On 

 comparing it with the figure given at p. 445 of the second edition of Bell's 

 'British Quadrupeds, including the Cetacea' (which is probably the figure 

 most accessible to the majority of our readers) it is seen to differ from it 

 in many respects. In the first place, the white spot above the eye is 

 very much larger in the Bergen specimen, extending from the eye back- 

 wards to an imaginary line drawn perpendicularly from the anterior 

 insertion of the flipper, the breadth of this spot being about one-third of 

 its length. In the second place, the specimen photographed has not the 

 belly white throughout its entire length, as represented by Bell. It is only 

 white " fore and aft," as a sailor would say, the intermediate portion being 

 of the same colour as the back and sides — namely, slaty black, so far as 

 can be judged. In the third place, the dorsal fin is not only more triangular 

 and upright, but is much more solid than is depicted in Bell's figure, and 

 without any indication, as there suggested, of what in a fish would be 

 termed fin-rays ; the same remark applying to the tail ; and, fourthly, as 

 regards the position of the flippers, which are oval anteriorly and pointed 

 posteriorly, they appear from the photograph to be directed backwards rather 

 than downwards, as represented by Bell, although doubtless they are capable 

 of a certain freedom of movement. The "saddle-mark" of a grey colour, 

 to which Bell makes allusion as being " sometimes" present, is seen in the 

 photograph to be situated immediately behind the dorsal fin. So far as 



