240 CETACEA 
of the United States several Whales of this species have been taken 
within the last few years. In the North Pacific a very similar if 
not identical species is regularly hunted by the Japanese, who tow 
the carcases ashore for the purposes of flensing and extracting 
the whalebone. In the tropical seas, however, according to Captain 
Maury’s whale charts, Right Whales are never or rarely seen; but 
the southern temperate ocean, especially the neighbourhood of the 
Cape of Good Hope, Kerguelen’s Island, Australia, and New Zea- 
land, is inhabited by “Black Whales,” once abundant, but now 
nearly exterminated through the wanton destruction of the females 
as they visit the bays and inlets round the coast, their constant 
habit in the breeding time. The range of these Whales southward 
has not been accurately determined ; but no species corresponding 
with the Arctic Right Whale has as yet been met with in the 
Antarctic icy seas. 
Fic. v8.—The right tympanic bone of an immature individual of the Greenland Whale 
(Balena mysticetus), from the inner (4) and outer (B) aspects. 3 natural size. (From the 
Proce. Zool. Soc.) 
_ Remains of Right Whales are of not uncommon occurrence in the 
Pliocene Crag deposits of England and Belgium. The tympanics 
of B. afinis from these deposits appear to indicate a species closely 
allied to B. mysticctus, in which this bone is long and angulated 
anteriorly (Fig. 78); while the tympanics from the same deposits 
described as B. primigenia are shorter and more rounded at the 
antero-inferior angle, thus resembling those of B. australis. A 
smaller species, having an estimated length of about 20 feet, has 
been described as Balenula balenopsis, the generic distinction being 
made on account of the free condition of the atlas and seventh 
cervical vertebre ; but it seems scarcely advisable to regard such a 
feature as indicating more than a less specialised species. Balena 
(Balenotus) insignis is a whale of somewhat larger dimensions, in 
which the atlas is generally, and the seventh cervical vertebra, 
