286 MISCELLANEOUS OBJECTIONS TO THE [Chap. VIL 



fa mily has sometimes been called Crihlatores, or sifters. 

 I hope that I may not be misconstrued into saying that 

 the progenitors of whales did actually possess mouths 

 lamellated like the beak of a duck. I wish only to show 

 that this is not incredible, and that the immense plates 

 of baleen in the Greenland whale might have been 

 developed from such lamellae by finely graduated steps, 

 each of service to its possessor. 



The beak of a shoveller-duck (Spatula clypeata) is 

 a more beautiful and complex structure than the mouth 

 of a whale. The upper mandible is furnished on each 

 side (in the specimen examined by me) with a row or 

 comb formed of 188 thin, elastic lamellae, obliquely be- 

 velled so as to be pointed, and placed transversely to the 

 longer axis of the mouth. They arise from the palate, and 

 are attached by flexible membrane to the sides of the 

 mandible. Those standing towards the middle are the 

 longest, being about one-third of an inch in length, and 

 they project '14 of an inch beneath the edge. At their 

 bases there is a short subsidiary row of obliquely trans- 

 verse lamella?. In these several respects they resemble 

 the phites of baleen in the mouth of a whale. But 

 towards the extremity of the beak they differ much, as 

 they project inwards, instead of straight downwards. 

 The entire head of the shoveller, though incomparably 

 less bulky, is about one-eighteenth of the length of the 

 head of a moderately large Balaenoptera rostrata, in 

 which species the baleen is only nine inches long ; so 

 that if we were to make the head of the shoveller as 

 long as that of the Bakenoptera, the lamellae would be 

 six inches in length, — that is, two-thirds of the length 

 of the baleen in this species of whale. The lower 

 mandible of the shoveller-duck is furnished with lamellae 



