238 CETACEA 
passing freely from one to the other, it is never seen so far south 
as Cape Farewell ; but on the Labrador coast, where a cold stream 
sets down from the north, its range is somewhat farther. In the 
Behring Sea, according to Scammon, “it is seldom seen south of 
the fifty-fifth parallel, which is about the farthest southern extent 
of the winter ice, while on the Sea of Okhotsk its southern limit is 
about the latitude of 54°.” As has been abundantly shown by 
Esehricht and Reinhardt in the case of the Greenland seas, “ every- 
thing tends to prove,” Scammon says, “that the Bulan inysticetus 
is truly an ‘ice whale,’ for among the scattered floes, or about the 
borders of the ice-fields or barriers, is its home and feeding-ground. 
It is true that these animals are pursued in the open water during 
the summer months; but in no instance have we learned of their 
being captured south of where winter ice-fields are occasionally met 
with.” The occurrence of this species, therefore, on the British or 
any European coast is exceedingly unlikely, as when alive and in 
health the southern limit of its range in the North Sea has been 
ascertained to be from the east coast of Greenland at 64° N. lat. 
along the north of Iceland towards Spitzbergen, and a glance at a 
physical chart will show that there are no currents setting south- 
wards which could bear a disabled animal or a floating carcase to 
British shores. To this & priori improbability may be added the 
fact that no authentic instance has been recorded of the capture or 
stranding of this species upon any European coast; for the cases 
in which it has been reported as seen in British waters may be ex- 
plained by the supposition of one of the other species of the genus 
being mistaken for it. Still, as two other essentially Arctic 
Cetaceans, the Narwhal and the Beluga, have in a few undoubted 
instances found their way to British shores, it would be rash 
absolutely to deny the possibility of the Greenland Right Whale 
doing the same. 
Mia. 77.—Southern Right Whale (Balirni corstralis). 
i : Fling “ ix, - is ipa tee: 
The southern Right Whale (B. australis, Fig. 77) resembles the 
last in the absence of dorsal fin and of longitudinal fwrows in the 
skin of the throat and chest, but differs in that it possesses a smaller 
head in proportion to its body, shorter baleen, a different shaped 
contour of the upper margin of the lower lip, and a greater number 
