56 ESCHRICHT AND REINHARDT 



full-grown individual just mentioned was a male. To make this perfectly sure, its penis 

 followed in brine, and tliere was no possibility of its having been mistaken for another individual, 

 as it was the only one that had been caught near the factory for two years past. Our 

 other large skeleton was not full grown, yet very nearly so, and, though three feet longer than the 

 former, yet it would, as full grown, always have been reckoned as a whale of inferior size ; and 

 of this specimen too it was expressly stated that it was the skeleton of a male. "Few as 

 these facts are, yet they may, perhaps, serve to give some strength to the opinion that in the 

 Greenland whale, as in cetaceous animals in general (the Cachalots, and perhaps the Hyperoodons, 

 alone excepted, forming in this respect quite a group by themselves), the males are inferior in 

 size to the females, and that accordingly all statements about the greatest length of this whale 

 will only be true in the case of the latter sex.-^ 



Of reliable measurements, we have only the six given by Scoresby,^ and of the indivi- 

 duals measured the sex of only four is stated ; two were males, and two females. The longest 

 individual (fifty-eight English feet in length), was among those the sex of which is not stated. 

 We may, perhaps, be permitted to presume that it was a female. The largest but one was a 

 male, fifty-two English feet (fifty and a half feet Danish) long. Even if the measuring of 

 Scoresby be supposed to have been made with the strict accuracy of our proceeding, and 

 not along the curved line of the surface, but in a straight line from the foremost point of 

 the mouth to the notch between the expansions of the tail, there is still no certain authority 

 that the male of the North whale has ever attained a greater length than fifty and a half Danish 

 feet, and a difi'erence in size in such colossal animals of between forty-five and fifty and a half 

 feet is scarcely more considerable, comparatively speaking, than that which may usually be found 

 in individuals of the same species. 



In order to determine the usual length of the Greenland whale at birth, we believe we are right 

 in referring to the specimen mentioned in our list as No. 4, and figured in Plate I. It is true that 

 it was already swimming freely about at the side of the mother animal when harpooned, but part 

 of the umbilical cord was still attached. It has already been mentioned that at its arrival at 

 Copenhagen, preserved in brine, it measured thirteen feet in a straight line. That the North 

 whale at its birth is thirteen or fourteen feet long, or perhaps a little above that size, corresponds 

 both with the usual statements and with the general rule that the greater Cetaceans at their 

 birth measure between a third and a fourth of the full length of the adult animals — more exactly 

 speaking, a fourth ; while the smaller species, when newborn, already measure one third. Our 

 individual was a female. That the males at their birth are smaller than the females, or less 

 than thirteen or fourteen feet long, is at any rate improbable. 



Most of the right-whales in the temperate oceans scarcely attain the size of the largest Green- 

 land whales, though their females may sometimes become larger than the full-grown males of this 

 species. Of those that live in the Southern Atlantic we know especially, by the measurements 

 of Cuvier, that the skeleton of the Cape right-whale exhibited in the Paris Museum is 

 14m. 55 (= forty-six feet one third Danish) long. In the Museum of Bordeaux is a model 

 in papier måché of a right- whale foetus, which was taken in 1831 by Roussel de Vauzeme, 

 in the neighbourhood of Tristan d'Acunha, and measured two feet eight inches long (French 

 measure), which equals m. 866. On its label it is mentioned that the mother animal was 



^ See Appendix. " ' Account,' i, p. ,464. 



