PREFACE. 



Sevekal years ago one of the authors of the following essay, Mr. Eschricht, laid before the 

 Royal Danish Society of Letters and Science the result of some researches on the geographical 

 distribution and anatomical structure of the Greenland whale, or Mysticetus, but the publication 

 was at that time postponed by the author, as he hoped that by collecting new and more complete 

 materials he might bring his researches to a more satisfactory conclusion. This hope has been 

 fulfilled, though not in the way that he at that time expected. He was relying on the continued 

 assistance of his friend Captain HolboU,^ to whom he was already indebted for the greater part 

 of the materials on which he had founded his first researches upon the Greenland whale as well 

 as all his former essays on the northern Cetaceans. This faithful friend set out for Greenland 

 on the 25th of March, 1856, with the best promises, but neither he nor the vessel in which he 

 sailed with one of his sons has since been heard of. 



Thus Mr. Eschricht's expectations from that quarter were disappointed in a most deplorable 

 manner. But at the same time an opportunity offered itself of procuring for the society a more 

 complete monograph of the Greenland whale than his first work can be said to have been. Eor 

 the second of the authors of this memoir had also for several years investigated the same subject 

 quite independently, and, like his fellow-labourer, worked out the distribution and structure of 

 the Greenland whale ; a new-born animal, preserved in brine, which Major Fasting, then Inspector 



1 Charles Peter HolboU, a son of the worthy gardener at the botanical garden at Copenhagen, 

 Frederick Lewis Holboll, was born 31st December, 1795. The objects amidst which he grew up 

 awakened in him an early love of nature and natural history ; first he began to study botany, and then, no 

 less sedulously, zoology. He was destined to be a naval officer, and at a comparatively advanced age he 

 obtained his commission as lieutenant, in the year 1821. In the following year, being acknowledged 

 as a clever practical zoologist, he was sent by the government upon an expedition of two years' duration 

 to Greenland, partly to make himself acquainted with the whale fishery, partly to make collections of 

 objects belonging to the fauna of this Arctic country for the Royal Museum of Natural History. After 

 his return he was, in 1825, appointed "Inspector (Governor) of the Settlements and the Whale Fishery 

 in North Greenland." In 1828 he was removed to South Greenland. At his first appointment, in 

 1825, he had left the navy with the title of " Captain-Lieutenant" (Commander). 



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