2442 Letters of Rusticus. 



that the mutilated skull in the British Museum, ou which Mr. Gray has founded the 

 Hyperoodon latifrons, is but the skull of the adult male of the common species. We 

 require much information regarding the sexes of the whales stranded on our coasts, 

 and I cannot refer at present to the elaborate papers on the Cetacea by the illustrious 

 Eschricht, who may have touched on these questions. Your correspondent on 

 the great sea-serpent question in the ' Zoologist ' (Zool. 2397), tells us that Professor 

 Goodsir regards the vertebra? of the Stronsa shark as those of the Squalus maximus ; 

 which is, however, merely retailing the opinion advanced by Sir E. Home and Profes- 

 sor Owen. No one practically acquainted with these subjects will venture to assert, or 

 attempt to prove, that specific identity in the family of sharks can be predicated from 

 similarity, or identity of structure, in the vertebrae alone. Such a statement might, 

 doubtless, flow from a full belief in the Cuvierian dictum, which, however, is no longer 

 entertained by cautious inquirers, though still employed to overload our catalogues 

 with nominal species of extinct animals to exercise the credulity of mere geological 

 writers or readers. Your correspondent also undervalues the practical knowledge and 

 honesty of the Orkney observers, who are, from race and local circumstances, an intel- 

 ligent and shrewd people ; and I may be allowed to bear this testimony the more rea- 

 dily, from having spent many pleasant weeks in the Orkney Isles dredging, &c. But 

 they need no defence from me, seeing that so many of them are well able to take up 

 the cudgels. They have described very graphically the spiral valve of the small 

 intestine, and the bristles pulled from the putrid fins, and Dr. Fleming has correctly 

 referred the third pair of legs to the claspers — a mistake which might have occurred to 

 more initiated zoologists than the honest Orcadians. What an invaluable specimen 

 this great sea-monster would have been in the library of the Royal Institution after 

 the lecture on the " Nature of Limbs." How much obliged should nomologists be to 

 this stray observation of the Orkney fishermen, who, doubtless, saw further into 

 the true nature of legs than the anatomist or " anthropotamist " of the schools, men 

 evidently not endowed with a faculty for the reception of homologies, and who wan- 

 dered in darkness until light beamed from the Hunterian chair, on the benighted 

 intellects of councillors and lecturers. The learned Secretary of the Royal Institu- 

 tion should be instructed to offer a reward for the capture of Captain M'Quhae's iden- 

 tical sea-serpent, for certainly it would require such irrefragable evidence to convince 

 any but the undoubtedly profound anatomist, who listened to that learned discourse, 

 of the accuracy, not to mention the philosophy (Okenian), of those views. Our won- 

 der-loving cousins across the Atlantic will speedily claim the reward, and give to the 

 anxious world of science a great vertebrated sea centipede or millepede, as the case 

 may be. — A. G. Melville ; 31, Pelham Road, Brompton. 



Tlie Letters of Rusticus.* 



[My own interest in this work prevents my mentioning it with anything approach- 

 ing to praise : the publication having been undertaken at my sole charge, and every 

 page having passed under my eye, both as editor and printer, I am too much identi- 



* ' The Letters of Uusticas on the Natural History of Godalming ; extracted from 

 the Magazine of Natural History, the Entomological Magazine, and the Entomolo- 

 gist. London: John ,Vai> Voorpt, Paternoster How, 1849.' 



