470 CLASS MAMMALIA. 



We shall trouble our readers with no details respecting 

 any of these, as their authentication appears to be very 

 insufficient, and as they seem to be confounded with some 

 other species already noticed. But it would be great in- 

 justice to close this notice of the Cachalots generally with- 

 out giving the Baron's sentiments on this subject. In the 

 Ossemens Fossiles, after a compendious view of what other 

 authors have done, the Baron proceeds thus : — 



" Having thus explained the ideas of so many celebrated 

 men, may it not be considered as temerity on my part, to 

 maintain that at the present day there is but one species of 

 Cachalot really known, namely the Common Cachalot that 

 yields the spermaceti ? 



" And yet, when justice has been done to erroneous com- 

 binations of synonymes, when the Beluga and the Grampus 

 or Globiceps wrongly confounded with this genus have 

 been removed, what remains but Cetacea of great magni- 

 tude with the same general characters ? Enormous head, 

 in great part filled with spermaceti ; conical teeth more 

 or less arched, more or less blunt, about forty or fifty, but 

 on the reckoning of which we cannot always depend ; the 

 back provided with a prominence of no great projection, 

 which some call a fin-bone, a longitudinal crest, and some 

 a tubercle, and which some like Clusius, do not pretend to 

 have seen at all, having only observed the animal cast 

 ashore on its back, and not finding it so easy to turn a 

 carcass sixty or seventy feet long, and twenty feet thick. 

 Scarcely does such an occurrence take place, but the 

 populace rush to the spot and speedily dismember the body. 

 Fortunate if the naturalist can find but a few bones re- 

 maining. 



" If any precise observations on this subject could be 

 expected, it was when Camper compared the head of a 

 Cachalot wrecked at Audierne in 1784, with one preserved 

 in the church of Schevelingen in Holland, and which pro- 



