APPENDIX. 



BY THE EDITOR. 



It may be useful to add to the foregoing valuable monograph some observations upon the 

 skeleton of an adult female Greenland right-vphale, lately set up in the museum of the Royal 

 College of Surgeons of England. This appeared to me especially important, as the materials, 

 otherwise so rich, upon which the memoir was founded, were, as the authors tliemselves regretted, 

 deficient in a full-grown specimen of this sex. 



The skeleton was obtained from the same locality as all of those previously described, viz., 

 Holsteinsborg, in South Greenland. It was sent, in 1863, to the Royal Zoological Museum at 

 Copenhagen, and, through the kind mediation of Professor Reinhardt, was purchased from that 

 institution by the Council of the Royal College of Sm-geons. Of the sex of the animal from 

 which it was obtained there can be no doubt, as a foetus taken from it, and the characteristic soft 

 parts, were forwarded with the skeleton to Copenhagen. 



The bones were but roughly cleaned, and the vertebrae, in groups of four or five or more, 

 were attached togethsr by their intervertebral substance. Although this was somewhat dried, 

 after soaking for a few days in water it appeared to gain its natural consistence and bulk, and 

 thus afforded a tolerably close approximation to the distances at which the different vertebræ 

 should be placed, and consequently of the length of the whole vertebral column. I find that this 

 amounts to twenty-nine feet, while the cranium, in a straight line, is seventeen feet long. The 

 animal must have been very nearly, if not quite, full grown ; the epiphyses of the humerus are 

 firmly united to the shaft, without a trace of their original separation remaining ; in the dorsal and 

 lumbar regions of the spinal column they are still separable from the ends of the bodies of the 

 vertebræ ; in the caudal region they are ankylosed. It is, therefore, much in the same stage of 

 growth as, or perhaps shghtly younger than, the largest skeleton mentioned in the memoir, now 

 in the Royal Museum of Natural History at Brussels, and which measures, as at present articu- 

 lated, fifty feet three inches in length. 



The evidence afforded by this new specimen gives no corroboration to the theory that the 

 female Greenland whale exceeds the male in size ; indeed, as far as one specimen can prove any- 



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