300 LILLJEBORG ON THE 



of the preceding genera. Its length and width are ahnost equal. Eoth the fore and the hinder 

 edges are concave. It is of an unusual thickness, and diflfers in this from that of B. mysticetus. 

 It also differs from the same in not having a processus coracoideus. Its acromion is thick, 

 directed somewhat downwards, and has had cartilage on the point. A conspicuous spina scapulæ 

 extends a little way up from the acromion. The caput forms, where the processus coracoideus 

 would have been, an acute angle directed inwards, on which apparently there was formerly carti- 

 lage. It may therefore possibly have had a cartilaginous, rudimentary, or not developed processus 

 coracoideus. This whale approaches, by not having this process, the same group as the " Baleine 

 du Cap" described by G. Cuvier,^ or Balæna audralis, Desmoulin. The Nordcaper, or Biscay 

 whale, belongs, according to Eschricht,^ to the same group, and it is, therefore, with these two 

 that it should be compared. A.s the Biscay whale, as far as we know, belongs only to the 

 northern hemisphere, and B. australis only to the southern, it seems from this fact alone that it 

 probably is nearest to, if not identical with, the Biscay whale.'' This is my reason for the above- 

 stated opinion, that one of the species of the genus Balæna found in Scandinavia may yet exist 

 in more southern seas, and has probably visited our shores in a period less inclement than that 

 in which Balæna mysticetus lived among the ice in the seas of Scandinavia. As we may, from 

 what Eschricht says at the place quoted, soon expect from him and Professor Reinhardt a minute 

 and complete description of the Greenland whale and the Nordcaper or Biscay whale, we hope 

 soon to have this question solved. It has been estimated that the place where the Svedenborgian 

 whale bones were found is 330 feet above the level of the sea.* 



I have mentioned, in the above-quoted discourse, at the meeting of naturalists in Copen- 

 hagen in 1860, that I have had the opportunity of examining a vertebra which is preserved in the 

 Edbo church in Roslagen (Sweden), and which belonged to the whale that, according to Radloff' s 

 description of the ' Administrative District of Stockholm,' and a citation from the " Rimkronika," 

 in the same work, was stranded in a bay of the sea at Edbo, in 1489, and was cut to pieces by the 

 inhabitants ; this vertebra is, as far as is known, the only remaining part of this skeleton. I have, 

 however, at the same place, mentioned that some whale bones, from an unknown locality, have 

 for a considerable period been preserved in the zoological museum here, among which there is a 

 large shoulder-blade, which, from the similarity of the bone, in regard to the state of preservation 

 with that of the Edbo vertebra, I consider may have belonged to the same skeleton. I supposed, 

 then, that this shouldei'-blade was not from a B. mysticetus, but from some species nearly related 

 to it ; but I have since been convinced that it corresponds in every respect with the shoulder- 

 blade of that species. The form and dimensions of the vertebra show very plainly that it is 

 one of the anterior lumbosacral vertebræ of a Balæna, but, as it is without processes, it will be 

 impossible to decide to which species, in the genus, it has belonged. Its length is 10|", 



^ ' Reclierclies sur les Ossemens Fossiles,' t. v, 1, p. 374, &c. 



^ ' Oversigt over det K. Danske Vidensk. Selskabs Jorhandlinger,' 1858, p. 225. 



^ [1 may now add that I have seen the skeleton of a new-born young of the Biscay whale in the 

 Physiological Mnseum at Copenhagen, presented by the Spanish government, and that it had the ribs 

 of quite the same form as the Svvedenborgian whale, but that its scapula was rather broader, probably 

 because it was younger. — 1865.] 



* Nilsson's 'Foredrag vid Naturforskare-Motet i Stockholm,' 1851, Forh., p. 60. 



