310 MR. W. H. FLOWER ON THE OSTEOLOGY OF THE SPERM-WHALE. 
5. In a small octavo work, entitled “ History and Description of the Skeleton of a 
New Sperm-Whale lately set up in the Australian Museum, by William S. Wall, 
Curator,” &c., Sydney, 1851, the description, although defective in many respects, is on 
the whole the most complete yet published, as the skeleton which is the subject of it, 
although very young, was in a tolerably perfect state. The memoir is accompanied by 
a rudely executed drawing, on a small scale, of the entire skeleton, and also of the 
sternum, hyoid, and pelvic bones*. 
6. In the ‘ Descriptive Catalogue of the Osteological Series of the Museum of the 
Royal College of Surgeons’ (1853), Professor Owen has given a somewhat detailed account 
of the form and relations of the cranial bones in a very instructive skull of a foetal 
Cachalot contained in that collection. 
7. A woodcut figure of the same skull has been given by Professor Huxley in his 
‘Elements of Comparative Anatomy,’ 1864. 
8. The petrotympanic bones of a Cachalot from the same Museum are figured in 
Owen's ‘ British Fossil Mammals.’ 
9. Dr. Gray (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1864, p. 590, and 1865, p. 440) has given figures, taken 
from photographs, of the cervical vertebrae of two Cachalots in the Museum at Sydney, 
which he regards as belonging to distinct species. 
Numerous as the above-noticed works may appear, the information contained in them 
is but fragmentary, and very much still remains to be done before our knowledge of the 
osteological characters of this huge and strangely modified Mammal can be said to be 
placed on the footing which its interest ought to secure for it. 
In the present communication it is my intention,— 
I. To give a description, accompanied by detailed drawings, of the nearly perfect 
skeleton of an adolescent male Cachalot, which was taken in the latter part of the year 
1864 off the south-west coast of Tasmania, and the bones of which were prepared with 
great care and at considerable trouble and expense by W. L. Crowther, Esq., M-R.C.S. E., 
of Hobart Town, and by him presented to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. 
II. To compare this skeleton with other skeletons or parts of skeletons which are 
available for the purpose. As materials for this portion of the work I may especially 
mention :— 
a. Various portions of the skeletons of Cachalots from the Tasmanian seas, also pre- 
sented to the Museum of the College of Surgeons by Mr. Crowther, comprising the 
* It is stated by Dr. G. Bennett (Gatherings of a Naturalist, 1860, p. 162) that the real author of this work 
was the late William Sharpe Macleay. But as there is no indication of this in the work itself, as Wall’s name 
alone appears on the titlepage, and as he has been allowed by Macleay to identify himself with the author 
of the book, especially when speaking in the first person of acts connected with the preparation of the skeleton 
(see pp. 4, 5, &e.), which Dr. Bennett himself attributes to Wall, I shall always quote it under the latter name 
only. Some authors have, without any explanation, quoted this work as “ Macleay’s ’—a practice which must 
necessarily introduce confusion into cetological literature. 
