PREFACE. vii 



authors of the memoir, seems scarcely sufficiently distinctive. " Greenland whale," by which it 

 is spoken of by Scoresby and most other English writers, would also scarcely separate it from the 

 Hump-backs and Fin-whales found in the seas near that country. The term " Right-whale," 

 understood and used by all whalers, and having its equivalent in the Danish "Rethval" and the 

 French " Baleine franche," forms a convenient EngUsh terra .for the restricted genus Balæna. 

 Greenland Right-whale has the advantage of retaining one of the most familiar distinctive appella- 

 tions of the animal, while it is correct in implying that its main habitat is in the seas lying both 

 to the east and west of Greenland, where, as far as is yet known, no other species of true Balæna 

 or Right-whale is found.^ 



To render this memoir as complete an exposition of the osteology of the species as available 

 materials will permit, I have appended some notes upon a fine skeleton lately added to the 

 Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and obtained from the same source as those described 

 in the work itself. 



II. On the Species of Orca inJiabitinff the Northern Seas. — This was the last production of 

 the pen- of Professor Eschricht, who devoted the greater part of an active life to the study of the 

 Cetacea. The second part of the essay was still unfinished at the time of his lamented death, but 

 was yet thought worthy, in its incomplete state, of publication in the ' Proceedings of the Danish 

 Royal Society.' All the killers or grampuses (genus Orca) of the northern seas had generally been 

 supposed to belong to a single species. The proposition made in this essay to divide them into 

 three will be the more readily accepted by zoologists, being the final result of the laboui's in this 

 field of so exact and cautious an observer as Eschricht, who has certainly never shown favour to 

 the excessive multiplication of species. 



III. On Pseiidorca crassidens. — In this essay Professor Reinhardt has given a careful and 

 detailed description of the external and osteological characters of a remarkable form of Cetacean, 

 hitherto only known by a skull exhumed from a fen in Lincolnshire, and therefore thought to 

 have been long extinct. The sudden appearance of several individuals of this species on the coast 

 of Denmark in 1862 shows how much may still be unknown of the Cetacean life, even in seas 

 most frequented by civilised and observing man. 



The wood-blocks used to illustrate this essay and the preceding are, with two exceptions, 

 those used in the originals, and have been kindly lent for the purpose by the Danish Royal 

 Society. 



IV. Professor Lilljeborg's essay on the Scandinavian Cetacea is chiefly based on observations 

 iipon the skeletons of animals of this order contained in the various museums of Sweden and 

 Norway. 



The most important novelties are the description of two perfectly distinct species of large 

 whales found in a subfossil state in the former country. The woodcuts illustrating some 

 characteristic parts of one of these are not in the original, but have been engraved from drawings 



^ The species is called by Anderson " Der rechte Gronlandische Wallfisch," ' Nachrichten von 

 Island,' &c., 1746. 



