132 



ESCHRICHT AND REINHARDT 



Nothing of these osseous parts of the Greenland whale skeleton will generally be 

 shown to the zoologist but these two free surfaces at the extremities, and we know from 

 experience that even very practised zoologists and zootomists havejbeen at a loss to interpret them 

 in their isolated condition. We may, however, immediately be led to the just interpretation of 

 them by noticing the extremely different appearance Avhich their free surfaces have when compared 

 with the whole remaining surface. Just as the smoothness of the former shows us, at the first 

 glance, that they have had a free position in the skeleton, so the remarkable roughness of the latter 

 surface, and the internal structure of the whole osseous part, will show us no less distinctly that it 

 has been hidden in a cartilaginous mass, with the exception only of those two surfaces ; its 

 form, finally, however it may vary during the progress of ossification, renders it impossible 

 to believe that such an osseous nucleus belonged to a vertebral body, or to any other bone of 

 the skeleton, especially as we cannot find in any other bone two free and smooth surfaces opposite 

 to and almost quite parallel with each other. 



For a further illustration of this we give below a figure, half the natural size, of 

 the ossification in one of these carpal bones of our forty-seven and a half feet long 

 skeleton. 



This osseous nucleus has only a straight superior surface, 

 its inferior surface is convex, a proof that in the former the 

 nucleus has reached the surface of the carpal cartilage in its 

 whole extent, while it is not so in the latter. The constriction 

 between the centre part and the two extremities is only slight, 

 but, nevertheless, sufficiently marked to denote the original 

 globular form of the nucleus. The exceedingly loose struc- 

 ture of the bone may still be pretty distinctly observed in 

 this diminished representation, as it is grooved in all di- 

 rections by tubular cavities divided into multifarious branches 

 in which dried-up blood-vessels may still frequently be 

 found. 



How many ossifications appear on the free smfaces of 

 a dried carpus of a whale's skeleton depends, of course, on how 

 far its ossification has proceeded. But in every carpal bone the ossification begins only from 

 one single nucleus ; the greatest number of such ossifications accordingly correspond to the 

 number of the carpal bones, and this number is in the Greenland whale hardly ever greater than 

 five. Now, as Cuvier has mentioned seven nuclei of ossification in the carpus of the Cape 

 whale, it seems that Ave may also in this cii'cumstance fijid a good distinguishing mark between 

 these two species of right-whales. 



In the description of the manus itself, in the Greenland whale, we may be brief as far as the 

 thumb is concerned, referring our readers to what we have stated about it in the description of 

 the carpus. That single bone of which it consists must, as it seems to us, be interpreted 

 as a metacarpal bone, or perhaps, as a bone representing the metacarpal as well as the 

 phalanges properly so called. This imperfect bone of the thumb was in our old skeletons, like 

 all other bones belonging to the digits, ossified in the middle and cartilaginous in both its 

 extremities. It is so short, and is placed so high, that it does not reach much below the 

 middle of the metacarpal bone of the index. It is at the same time curved towards the latter 



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