FOSSIL MAMMALIA. 147 



chance, their bodies have been cast ashore, in the neighbourhood 

 of some enhghtened man, they have been scarcely ever described 

 with exactitude, or compared with accuracy. 



Myriads of sailors have caught and divided whales, who 

 perhaps have never had the opportunity of properly contem- 

 plating one in its entire state. Yet naturalists have deemed 

 themselves able to compose the history of these animals, from 

 the vague descriptions and the ruder figures given by such 

 uninstructed observers. No critical accuracy, no correct de- 

 duction, could exist in such compilations for want of the proper 

 basis of well- authenticated facts. Consequently we find the 

 history of the cetacea, on the one hand, meagre in the extreme, 

 and, on the other, swarming with contradictions, and confusions 

 of nomenclature. 



Furnished with such imperfect materials of truth, and per- 

 plexed and encumbered by such abundance of falsehoods, the 

 most expert naturalist must encounter incalculable difficulty in 

 separating the one from the other, and reducing the chaotic 

 mass to any thing like harmony and order. He must beware 

 of attaching too much importance to these vague and contra^ 

 dictory accounts, as to establish on them alone the distinction 

 of species, and still less those of genera and sub-genera. It is 

 no doubt easy, from rude figures drawn from imagination or 

 memory — from confused and mutilated descriptions — from the 

 accumulation of synonimes, which are but copies of each other, 

 to produce a long catalogue of species which have no reality, 

 and which the slightest breath of criticism is sufficient to de- 

 stroy ; but a line of conduct precisely the reverse of this is ne- 

 cessary to be pursued, if natural history is ever to be freed from 

 absurdity and disorder, and established on the basis of truth. 



One of those causes which have most contributed to embarrass 

 the history of the cetacea is, that the people of the North, from 

 whom our knowledge of them is chiefly gleaned, as it is in their 

 latitudes that they most abound, designate them all by one 

 common generic name. Thus, wall in German, whale in 



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