ON THE GREENLA.ND RIGHT-WHALE. 57 



twenty-one times as long, /. e. fort3r-tliree and one sixth French feet or fourteen metres, equal to 

 forty-four feet and a half Danish. In the yard of the Museum of Paris a skeleton of a South 

 Sea right-whale (a pregnant female) is exhibited, from the Bay of Acaroa, in New Zealand, 

 which (according to the statement which M. Gratiolet, the distinguished naturalist at the 

 Museum, was kind enough to give us) was measured at the fishing-place by Lieutenant Meryon, 

 and found to be 15m. 9 long, that is, forty-nine feet two thirds Danish; and the female whale 

 which Dieffenbach measured in Jackson's Bay, of the same island, and of which he brought 

 home a drawing, upon which Dr. Gray founded his Balæna antipodarum, '_was sixty feet 

 English, or fifty-eight and a quarter feet Danish, long ; it was, however, considered to be an 

 unusually large specimen.^ 



Now, as to the right- whales at present nearly extirpated from the Atlantic north of the 

 Equator, the more ancient whale fishers agree in stating them to be considerably smaller than the 

 Greenland whale, not only in the circumference of the body, but also in length. Those right- 

 whales, on the contrary, that live in the Northern Pacific seem, if not to exceed, yet to be quite 

 equal in size to the Greenland whale. It is true that we do not know of any measurements of 

 these whales made by professional naturalists ; but, according to the information obtained by one 

 of the authors (Reinhardt) during his stay in the Sandwich Islands, it seems, indeed, that they 

 may attain a length of seventy feet. Thus he was told by the mate of the whaler, " Die Elbe," that 

 this vessel, in the fishing season of 1846, somewhat to the south of Mount Kronotsky 

 caught a right-whale, which was measured on account of its size, and was found to be seventy- 

 one feet long, and forty-eight feet in circumference, its longest blades of whalebone measuring 

 thirteen and a half feet. 



Accordingly the length of a right-whale cannot by itself, except in rare cases, be of use 

 in determining to what species it belongs. 



As one of the most essential characteristics of the Greenland whale we must mention the 

 disproportionate size of its head as compared with the rest of its body. In this respect, all the 

 right-whales are superior to the rorquals, but among the right-whales themselves the first place 

 must be assigned to the Greenland whale. This observation is not, however, equally true of 

 all individuals of the species ; nay, it is even stated by Captain Scoresby," so well experienced in 

 these matters, that the difference is so great, that it might almost lead to the supposition of 

 there being several sub-species or varieties among them. Thus, in some individuals, he found 

 the head to be four tenths of the whole length of the animal, in others scarcely three tenths ; 

 he also found in some, the circumference of the body to be upwards of seven tenths of the 

 length ; in others less than six tenths, or even little more than one half. 



We have also found in our skeletons dissimilarities of the same kind, but so far from 

 supposing sub-species or varieties to exist, we believe that they wiU be found to indicate a regular 

 difference of sex and age. Our measurements gave the following proportions : 



^ Dieffenbach, E., ' Travels in ISTe-^v Zealand,' vol. i, p. 4-1. 

 " ' Account/ ), p. 469. 



