by MM. Van Beneden and Gervais. 197 
the same time I would not deny that the whales of this latter 
place may not be a different species; but as yet we have not 
sufficient materials for separating and characterizing them. 
In 1834 a female whale and its young were captured at 
St. Sebastian, and the skeleton of the young remained for 
some time at Pampeluna; it has since been removed to the 
museum at Copenhagen: and this is the specimen which has 
been named Balena biscayensis by Eschricht, who gives an 
account of it in the ‘Comptes Rendus’ for 1860, and in the 
* Actes de la Soc. Linn. Bordeaux,’ vol. xiii.; and he thinks 
that he observed in the development of the various parts of the 
skeleton a difference from that which he had observed in the 
skeletons of Balena mysticetus. But we must recollect that 
this was to support a theory that the latter whale was exclu- 
sively confined to the Polar seas and that the Right Whale of 
the North Atlantic must be different; but I do not see why, 
as the icebergs are annually carried out by the currents from 
the Arctic Sea to the North Atlantic, the Right Whale may 
not sometimes come down with them. 
I have only Mr. Flower's note of the Pampeluna skeleton 
(Annals, 1868, vol. i. p. 244); and although it is now at Copen- 
hagen, there is no description or figure of it in MM. Van Beneden 
and Gervais's ‘ Ostéographie des Cétacés?’ The Balena bis- 
cayensis of these latter authors is founded on what appear to 
me to be very incongruous materials, which would require a 
great stretch of credulity to believe that they belong to the same 
whale ; I am sure that two of the specimens do not ; indeed the 
authors seem to express a doubt with regard io one themselves. 
But the only ground on which they are united is that all the 
Specimens were procured from the North Atlantic, together 
with the preconceived idea that only one whale can inhabit 
that region. 
First, they rely on a mass of cervical vertebra which pro- 
bably came from the Mediterranean ; it is figured by Lacépede, 
