894 PRINCIPAL SIR WILLIAM TURNER ON 
Escuricut that his name brscayensis should be preserved, and in this connection, there- 
fore, it is employed in this memoir. 
Early, however, in the nineteenth century it was recognised that in the American 
waters of the North Atlantic, as well as in the temperate seas of the southern hemi- 
sphere, Right Whales were found smaller in size, and with shorter whalebone than is 
present in mysticetus. Dxsmovtins* described in 1822 by the name Balena australis 
a whale which frequented the seas around the Cape of Good Hope. Right Whales had 
been captured near New Zealand, and as far south as Kerguelen Island, also in the seas 
of Japan and Korea, to which local names, as B. antipodarum and japanensis, had been 
applied. Fiscumr described a foetus of B. australis caught in 1831 near Tristan da 
Cunha in the South Atlantic.t Escuricur and Retnuarpr referred to whales regularly 
caught off the coast of New England as probably the same species as the Nordeaper. 
In the year 1865 Professor Copr commenced his series of memoirs on the Cetacea 
caught off the coasts of the United States by describing the skeleton of the Black 
Whale in the Museum of the Academy of Sciences, Philadelphia,t and he named the 
species Balena cisarctica. The skeleton, including the intervertebral cartilages, was 
37 feet long, the skull of which measured 8 feet 5 inches. In a memoir published in 
1883, J. B. Houper described § three specimens: a male 40 feet 4 inches long, caught 
at Charleston in 1880; a female 48 feet long, off the coast of New Jersey in 1882; and 
a third, sex unknown, 35 feet long, on Long Island, New York. F. W. Trug, in his 
important memoir, continued the data collected by Hotper, supplied additional facts 
and opinions, reviewed and summarised the evidence bearing on the Right Whale which 
frequented opposite coasts of the North Atlantic, and came to the conclusion that 
B. biscayensis and B. cisarctica were the same species. 
Many naturalists are of opinion that the Right Whale of the southern hemisphere 
should not be regarded as a species distinct from the Right Whale of the North Atlantic, 
and as the name B. australis given by DesmouLins to the southern species preceded 
Escuricut’s name B. biscayensis, it has been held that it should be the specific name 
for the Right Whale which frequents the temperate waters of both hemispheres. It 
should, however, be remembered that the Right Whale of the Bay of Biscay and the 
North Atlantic had been known, captured, and many of its characters recognised long 
before the southern Right Whale had been seen by zoologists. 
Half a century ago, largely under the influence of the late Dr J. E. Gray, it would 
have been thought impossible for the same species of whale to have lived both north 
and south of the Equator, and specific names were multiplied to indicate distinct species 
liviug not only in opposite hemispheres, but in different seas in the same hemisphere, 
even though they corresponded in their generic characters. For example, the beaked 
whale Ziphius cavirostris, obtained by Cuvier in the Mediterranean in 1804, was 
regarded by zoclogists as both specifically and even generically distinct from certain 
* Dict. Class. d Hist. Nut., ii., 1822. + Actes de la Soc. Linnéenne de Bordeaux, xxvii., Nov. 1868. 
{ Proc, Acad, Nat. Sc., Philadelphia, 1865. § Bull. American Museum, New York, vol. i. No. 4, 1883. 
