481< On the Great Rorqual of the Indian Ocean. [No. 5. 



little more from the head and is well developed." To cite further 

 communications of the kind would be mere repetition. 



No other Balamida attain the dimensions of the largest BaIuE- 

 KOPTERiE, including the known examples stranded within the Bay 

 of Bengal ; and the peaked dorsal fin is of itself a distinction. 

 Moreover, the finless or ' Eight Whales' are restricted to cold lati- 

 tudes, where only, it would seem, they can obtain a sufficiency of 

 their peculiar food : the Eorquals subsisting mainly on Cephalopoda. 

 According to Scorseby, the great Northern or Greenland Whale (B. 

 mtsticetus) " has never been seen beyond the limits of the Arctic 

 Ocean." Another (B. japonic a, Gray, — B. australis of Temminck 

 apud Gray,) descends more southward in the comparatively cold 

 oceanic region of the Northern Pacific. In the southern hemisphere 

 there would also appear to be two species (recognised as such by 

 seamen with whom I have conversed), — B. australis, Desinoulins 

 ( le Grand Balein du Cap, Cuvier, — B. antarctica ? Lesson), — and 

 B. Antarctica Gray, (vel antipodum, Gray, figured in Dieffenbach's 

 'New Zealand).' In the Timor seas, 'Black Whales' in addition to 

 1 Sperm' are stated to exist in considerable numbers ; but those ' Black 

 Whales' I have been assured are ' Hunch-backs', which are much more 

 nearly akin to the ' Fiuners' or Eorquals : though I suspect them to be 

 a small kind of Cachelot subsequently noticed (Euphtsetes graii). # 



* The locality known as Wal-msch (i. e. ( Whale-fish') Bay, latterly spelt 

 4 Walwich,' on the E. coast of S. Africa, is considerably within the southern 

 tropic ; but the name may well refer to Cachelots or c Sperm Whales.' 



In a short account of Timor, published in Moor's Notes on the Indian Archi- 

 pelago, we read that the coast people of the island of Selvi (one of the Timor 

 group) " are such expert fishermen that they constantly take the species of Whale 

 called Black-fish, which are often 20 ft. long, and which afford oil inferior only 

 to the spermaceti, having the same substance in the head as the Spermaceti 

 Whale. They do not boil the blubber, but expose it to the sun in an inclined 

 situation with a ditch at the bottom into which the oil drains." A small species 

 of the Physetee group must be here intended ; but the Black-fish of the Bay 

 of Bengal is Globicephaltts indictjs, nobis. As for the Sperm-whale fishery 

 in the eastern seas, the Sulu or Mindoro Sea, between Borneo and the Philip- 

 pines, in from 50° to 100° E. L., is at present I believe the grand resort of the 

 whalers. 



' Sperm Whales' were formerly hunted off the shores of the Antilles. Thus, the 

 excellent observer, Mr. Richard Hill, of Spanish Town, Jamaica, writes to his friend 



