28 ESCHRICHT AND REINHARDT 



appearance in the iceless temperate Atlantic must be derived from confused or erroneous 

 information. We cannot but suppose that the Greenland whale has lived in times of yore as well 

 as now, summer and winter, close to the Polar ice, and that those right-whales said to have formerly 

 repaired every winter to the Bay of Biscay, and afterwards caught in numbers in the sea south of 

 Iceland, and between that island and Northern Norway, were not Greenland whales. The 

 gradual disappearance of right-whales in all the northern iceless Atlantic cannot be accounted for 

 by supposing that these animals have been pursued up into the Arctic Sea ; it cannot even be 

 explained by supposing a local extirpation of the individuals of the Greenland whale living most 

 southwards, but it is only to be accounted for by an extirpation, more or less complete, of a 

 Cetacean animal different from the Greenland whale. 



In this case, the Greenland whale must, even as late as in the sixteenth century, have been 

 perfectly unknown to all European nations, with the exception of the Norwegian settlers in Ice- 

 land, the most northerly coast of which is frequently reached by Polar ice, and in Greenland, 

 where, though the whale can scarcely be supposed to have come down to that part of the east and 

 west coast, in which they founded their settlements, the old Norwegians, at all events, had an 

 opportunity of being acquainted with it on their frequent voyages in the summer, on which they 

 reached the most northerly part of Baffin's Bay, and where they even visited the whaling stations, 

 Lancaster Sound, and Barrow Strait, so celebrated in our days, which, at least are supposed to 

 have been meant by the name of Kroksfjardarheidi,^ found in the old sagas. Thus, it is not in 

 the authors of classic antiquity, nor in those of the Middle Ages, but rather in the old Icelandic 

 writers, that we ought to search the most ancient information about the Greenland whale, and 

 an abundance of information we may find in one of the most remarkable of these works, the 

 celebrated "Kongespeil" (Mirror of Royalty) of the 12th century. It is true that the same 

 authenticity, so wiUingly conceded to the rest of this interesting composition, has not generally 

 been awarded to the description of the strange animals from the sea near Iceland, inserted into 

 the ' Mirror,' but it is quite an error to condemn this description as destitute of all worth and 

 importance ; and it is hardly too much to say that it is only from the present state of develop- 

 ment attained by science that it can be justly appreciated. 



The list of Cetaceans enumerated in the * Mirror' has been thought to be absurdly long, and 

 accordingly exceptionable, and, most probably, some species are really to be found there under 

 different denominations, and some of the creatures mentioned must unquestionably be considered 

 merely as myths. But as this composition contains fewer traces of superstition than any similar 

 writing of the same time, so it is, generally speaking, easy to distinguish the fabulous animals 

 from those of which the description is founded on real observation. And herein consists the 

 peculiar worth of the ' Mirror,' that it is the first writing after Aristotle, and the only one of the 

 middle ages, in which Cetaceans have been described from personal observation. That the 

 ' Mirror,' in its list of Cetaceans belonging to the most northerly seas, could enumerate many more 

 species than are to be found either in the old classics or in authors belonging to the five or six 

 centuries following, was partially the natural consequence of the fact that the authors really knew 

 a much greater number of species than the others could be acquainted with. For, of the Cetaceans 

 mentioned in the list of the ' Mirror,' the Greenland whale is not the only one that continued an 

 unknown animal to zoologists during several centuries ; the same observation will hold good 



^ Rafn, ' Antiquitates Americanæ,' p. 270 and 415 — 418. 



