NORTHERN SPECIES OP ORCA. 163 



its similarity with these two very good figures of cachalots is very small indeed. It is, 

 singular enough, the very low dorsal fin that especially reminds one of a cachalot, and the best 

 evidence of its having really been one is the tooth examined and figured by Sibbald 

 himself. 



The same remarks may be made with regard to the whale stranded in the Orkneys, for 

 Sibbald had not seen anything of this either, but some few teeth four or five inches long, and 

 the one of which he has given a figure is evidently an old and much worn cachalot tooth. 

 Those, who brought him the news of the stranding, and gave him the teeth, told him, that 

 it was a very large {prægrandis) female whale, having the blow-hole on the forehead ; its head 

 was eight or nine feet high, containing great quantities of spermaceti, and it had only teeth in 

 the lower javi^. One told him, that there was a fin on its back, which he compared with a mizen- 

 mast, and the same man stated that a male of the same kind had also been observed, which was 

 thought to have had a length of twenty-four fathoms [prgyiæ). Now this last statement is most 

 certainly exaggerated, but then it was only founded on an estimate of the size of an animal 

 moving freely about ; all boats approaching it had been crushed by it. But as to the stranded 

 specimen, his statements will not, on the whole, be found to contradict the evidence of the teeth 

 which prove it to have been a large old cachalot. It is highly creditable to this man's power 

 of observation, that he should have laid particular stress on the considerable height of the head, 

 and the place of the blow-hole on the forehead ; for up to that time the highly characteristic 

 square form of the head of the cachalot, and the peculiar place of the blow-hole on the forehead, 

 seem quite to have escaped the attention of learned naturalists. 



The comparison of the low dorsal fin with a mizen-mast has seemed to many, directly 

 to contradict the idea that the animal was a cachalot; but most probably, however, only 

 because a mizen-mast was considered (for instance, by Artedi), to be an extremely high mast. 

 But in seamen's language it is not the highest mast that is called by that name, but the 

 mast standing nearest to the helm, whether it be great or small ; and the small dorsal fin 

 of the cachalots (denominated by the South Sea whalers, the "hump"), is in reality, removed 

 very far backwards, that is, just above the vent, while a more insignificant protuberance 

 in the mesial line of the back (which they call the " bunch"), is to be found more forwards, 

 just above the angle of the mouth. Only one of the statements, we believe, must be called 

 perfectly wrong, viz., that the animal was a female ; for the tooth of which he has given a 

 figure, not only proves that the animal was a cachalot, but also that it was a very large 

 specimen, and we know that female cachalots never grow to more than one third of the size of 

 the males. But in the Cetaceans, no error is more frequently committed by inexperienced 

 persons, than that of mistaking a male, whose penis has not been drawn out of its sheath, for 

 a female. 



However that may be, so much is certain, that when Sibbald considered this Cetacean 

 which had only teeth in the lower jaw, and whose very great head contained a large quantity of 

 spermaceti, to be a species difierent from the common cachalots, as well as from the one 

 stranded in the Firth of Forth, he did so because there was a dorsal fin present, and by no 

 means on account of its supposed great height. 



On the foundation of the Linnean system, Artedi, to whom, we know, the arrangement of 

 Fishes and Cetaceans had been intrusted, adopted blindly, all kinds of Balænæ pointed out by 

 Sibbald as different species. Those with teeth only in the lower jaw he divided into two 



