ON THE GREENLAND RIGHT-WHALE. 27 



very next year, and was carried on without interruption, until it attained a high state of 

 development. At the same time it has been proved, by K. E. v. Baer,^ that the whale has 

 not been seen near the coasts of Nova Zembla. Generally speaking, in these seas the Greenland 

 whale has kept itself more towards the north than has been the case more westwards in Davis 

 Strait and Baffin's Bay. We know that it sometimes repairs to the north coast of Iceland, that 

 is to say, to the same degree of latitude which it commonly reaches in its migrations along 

 the west coast of Greenland ; but farther eastwards we can only mention Jan Mayen and 

 Spitzbergen as stations formerly visited by numbers of whales. This fact, however, when 

 examined more closely, will appear to have nothing strange in it; it is, on the contrary, 

 rendered perfectly intelligible by the considerable curve into which the Une of the ice, or 

 the spring limit of the solid ice, is bent towards the north just in this place, so that this limit 

 directly south of Spitzbergen is as high as about 75° north latitude. Thus, in this place, 

 as in Davis Strait, it is not so much the degree of latitude as the limit of the ice that is 

 found to terminate the range of the whale, which appears, therefore, under exactly the same 

 circumstances in both regions of the ocean. Single individuals may of course, notwith- 

 standing this our general experience, have sometimes strayed beyond the usual limits, even as far 

 as the coast of northern Europe. It would not be surprising that a Greenland whale should 

 occasionally be stranded on the northern shores of Europe, this having happened four or five 

 times to the narwhal, an animal as exclusively confined to the Polar region as the former. Yet 

 we do not know even a single well-authenticated instance of such an occurrence. It is true that 

 Th. Bell, on the authority of Dr. T. Barclay, has stated that emaciated Greenland whales have 

 occasionally been stranded on Zetland,^ but these statements are not accompanied by any par- 

 ticulars, and no part of the skeletons of these stranded whales, supposed to be Greenland whales, 

 is known to have been preserved. Even if we could be certain that the animals stranded were 

 right-whales and not fin-whales, it is by no means proved that they were Greenland whales ; 

 for we have seen that, near the coast of North America and in the temperate Atlantic, a right- 

 whale has existed, and does still exist, quite different from the Greenland whale. Further proofs 

 of the existence and appearance of such a whale, in the remaining part of the Northern Atlantic, 

 will presently be adduced, and this species is certainly more Hkely to have been the one stranded 

 in the case mentioned by Barclay than the Greenland whale.^ 



It thus follows that, as it is an essential part of the nature of the Greenland whale only to 

 live in the very coldest seas, never to wander very far from the ice, and never to retreat before it 

 but where its sohd continuity makes it impossible to breathe, this whale must, at all times, 

 have been the same Polar animal as in our days, and that it must always, and in all its individuals, 

 however numerous they may have been, have lived just in the same Avay as it lives at present. 

 All suppositions as to its having been chased up into these inhospitable seas by the persecutions 

 of man are untenable, and the statements that Greenland whales have regularly made their 



^ Wiegmann's ' Arch, fiir Naturgeschichte,' vol. i, p. 168. 



^ Bell, Th., ' British Quadrupeds,' p. 518. 



^ In the 'Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror,' Dr. Gray ("Mammalia," p. 47) 

 states that a " Greenland whale" was stranded in the Bay of Caernarvon on the 4th of May, 

 1846, and towed into Liverpool. But, as subsequently shown by Dr. Gray, the animal proved, 

 on closer examination, to be a fin-whale, Physalus [Rorqualus) Boops, Gray, Cat. Cetacea, Brit. Mus. 

 1850. 



