44 ESCIIRICHT AND REINHARDT 



and all the pieces of whalebone have, as it were, a dirty, grayish, dim-looking covering, or a 

 dull, gray, and uneven crust, which cannot be scraped off without some of the inner portion 

 coming off with it, nor can the surface be made smooth and shining by friction alone. With 

 these differences in the exterior is also combined a difference in the internal structure of the 

 whalebone. When any piece of this substance is cut through, an external, more condensed, and 

 more uniform layer, which may be called by a term often nsed in an analogous manner in 

 histology, the cortical substance, can easily be distinguished from an internal and more fibrous 

 part, the medullary substance, consisthig of very fine tubes, being in renlity nothing but a part 

 of the whalebone hairs hidden by the external covering. In the Greenland whale the cortical 

 layer is comparatively thick, being considerably thicker than the internal medulla, which consists 

 of fibres running parallel with each other. In whalebone coming from the South Sea, on the 

 other hand, the cortical layer is relatively much thinner, and the great thickness of this whalebone is 

 chiefly owning to the hidden part composed of numerous and coarse whalebone hairs occupying about 

 a third of the whole diameter ; moreover, the single fibres of the medulla are not arranged regularly 

 parallel with one another, as in the Greenland whale, but more or less intertwined, and 

 accordingly it is much more difficult to split the South Sea whalebone than that of the Greenland 

 whale into long strips of uniform thickness. Finally, there is one mark by which the South Sea 

 whalebone may be easily distinguished, for a certain wave-like inflexion is always found in it, 

 repeated six or seven times in its whole length, w-hich may be seen most distinctly in those long 

 and thin quadrangular strips into which the whalebone is cut up by machinery. It is difficult, 

 even by strong pressure, to smooth down these inflexions, and this inconvenience, added to its 

 brittleness and the difficulty of splitting it, would render the South Sea whalebone considerably 

 inferior as an article of commerce to the Greenland whalebone, even if it had the same length as 

 the latter. How far a common characteristic distinguishing all the South Sea whales from the 

 Greenland whale may also be found in their skeletons cannot be decided with certainty at 

 present, for the Cape whale is still the only South Sea whale whose skeleton has been subjected 

 to close examination -^ of the right-wdiales from the Northern Pacific no skeleton, nor even any 

 part of it, seems ever to have reached Europe ; and although a skeleton of the New Zealand 

 Avhale has for some years been in the Paris Museum," it has not yet been accurately examined 

 and described. The drawings, however, that we have of the right-whale from the sea near Japan, 

 and of that indigenous in the sea near the coasts of New Zealand, make it at least very pro- 

 bable that these whales must share with the Cape whale the peculiarities of the cranium, by 

 which the latter differs so much from the Greenland whale ; we may, therefore, venture to presume 

 that they will also be found to possess the most essential of the other osteological peculiarities, 

 by which, as we shall shovt^ hereafter, their near relation is distinguished from the whales of the 

 Arctic seas, especially a well-developed thumb provided with two joints, and a shoulder-blade 

 without the least trace of any coracoid process. 



Now' to return to the " Nordkaper." Should this whale, a native of the Northern Atlantic, be 

 referred most appropriately to the group of South Sea whales, or was its structure more like that 

 of the Greenland whale? The former of these suppositions appears the most probable, for it is 

 supported by those very fevv^ statements which we have about its appearance and by its habitat in a 



' By Cuvier, in ' llecherches sur les Oss. Fossiles' (4'"'= ed. T. 8, p. 278, seq.). 



- Catalogue of tlie specimens of Maiam. in the coll. of the Brit. Museum. Parti, Cetacea, p. 18. 



