552 »1R. 1« BROWN ON THE CETACEANS [Nov. 12, 



'Great numbers are caught by means of nets at the entrance of fjords 

 and inlets, or in the sounds between islands. The young are darker- 

 coloured than the adult, and can at once be distinguished among 

 the herds of the ordinary waxy white colour. It is said to be 

 rarely seen far from laud. The males and females are together in 

 the drove, and not separate as has been stated. Their blast is not 

 unmusical ; and when under the water they emit a peculiar whistling 

 sound which might be mistaken for the whistle of a l)ird, and on 

 this account the seamen often call them sea-canaries ! It is rarely 

 that the whalers kill a white Whale, their swiftness and activity 

 giving them more trouble than the oil is worth*. They are some- 

 times also called " Sea-pigs," from their resemblance to that animal 

 when tumbling about in the water. 



13. MoNODONt MONOCEROS, Liun. 



(o) Popular names. — Narwhal, Unicorn, Unie (English whalers) ; 

 Narhval (Scandinavians) ; Tugalik (Greenlanders) ; Kelelluak-tuak 

 (Eskimo at Pond's Bay). 



(/3) Descriptive remarks. — The female Narwhal is more spotted 

 than the male. The young is again much darker ; and I have seen 

 individuals which were almost white, like the one Anderson describes 

 as having come ashore at the mouth of the Elbe. In a female killed 

 in Pond's Bay, in August 1861, the stomach was corrugated in 

 complicated folds, as were also the small intestines. It contained 

 crustaceans, bones of fish, and an immense quantity of the horny 

 mandibles of some species of Cephalopod (probably Sepia loligo) 

 firmly packed one within the other. In its stomach was a long 

 Ltimhricus-MVe; worm ; and the cavities behind the palate were filled 

 with froth and an innumerable number of little worms, such as 

 Scoresby describes in his account of the animal. In some animals 

 which I examined the bone was quite eaten away by them, and 

 that portion of the lining membrane which remained was red or in- 

 flamed. There is a curious anastomosis of reticulating arterial blood- 

 vessels inside the lining membrane of the thorax and abdomen and 

 around the spinal cord, which has doubtless a relation to its 

 amphibious life. The blow-holes are placed directly on the top 

 of the head, large, semilunar, opening on either side into two sacs 

 lined with a dark serous membrane, these openings, again, leading to 

 the bronchia and the lungs. The blow-hole has but one opening 

 externally, but about an inch down is divided into two by a car- 

 tilaginous septum, continuous a little further down with the bony 

 partition seen in the skull. The rima glottidis is exactly described 

 by the late Prof. Fleming, in the ' Wernerian Trans.' (vol. i. p. 146). 

 The female lias no "horus;" but inside the iutermaxillary bone are 

 two undeveloped tusks, each about 10 inches long, rough, and with 

 no inclination to a spiral — in fact not unlike a miniature piece of pig- 



* One of the whalers this summer killed several hundreds, but this is an almost 

 isolated case. 



t Lamarcli subsequently usurped this name for a genus of Pectinobranchiate 

 Mollusca. 



