352 Canadian Record of Science. 



specimen now in the collection of this Society is said to 

 have been taken in the St. Lawrence, near Montreal. 



In the Pleistocene Period, and especially in that part of 

 it marked by the deposit of the marine Leda clay, when 

 all the lower lands of the St. Lawrence valley were sub- 

 merged, the Beluga must have had a much wider range 

 than at present, and was probably very abundant. Hence 

 its remains have been more than once found in the Leda 

 clay, sometimes as entire skeletons, in other cases as 

 detached bones. Its first recorded occurrence was the 

 discovery of the greater part of a skeleton by Thompson, 

 the geologist of Vermont, in 1849, in a railway cutting 

 near Lake Champlain, at an elevation of 60 feet above 

 the lake, or about 150 feet above the sea. It occurred in 

 clay, the equivalent of our Leda clay, the Champlain clay 

 of Dana, associated with marine shells of northern types. 

 It was regarded by Thompson as a new species, and named 

 Beluga Vermontana ; but a comparison with the Canadian 

 specimens found later, and with recent bones in the 

 Museum of McGill College, enabled the late Mr. Billings 

 to refer it to the modern species usually known as Beluga 

 Gatodon, Lin., though the specific name, albicans, Miiller, 

 perhaps has priority. It is the Delphimts albicans of 

 Fabricuus in his Fauna Groenlandica (1780). The best 

 specimens heretofore found in Canada are one discovered 

 in Peel's Brickyard, Montreal, one found near Cornwall, 

 and another discovered at Bathurst, N.B., and described 

 by Gilpin and Honeyman. The two former specimens, of 

 which the first is nearly perfect, are now in the museum 

 of the Geological Survey in Ottawa, and were noticed by 

 the late Mr. Billings in the Proceedings of this Society. 



The present specimen was found in the brick-clay near 

 Papineau Road, by the workmen of Messrs. Smith, brick- 

 makers, when excavating the clay in the present winter. 

 By the care of these gentlemen the bones were collected 



i Thompson's Vermont, Appendix. 



