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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
possible. On the 15th. June it arrived at the University, and 
proved to be a fine specimen of an adult male Mesoplodon bidens. 
The whale had been flensed, eviscerated, and cut into blocks 
before being despatched to me ; all the skin had been removed 
except that of the tail and flippers. The thoracic and abdominal 
viscera had been removed en masse, and accompanied the divided 
carcass. From the extent to which the animal had been cut up, 
my notes on the soft parts are necessarily very fragmentary ; and as 
the specimen reached me in the hot weather in June, more than a 
fortnight after the death of the whale, the viscera could only be 
examined in a very general way. 
When the various blocks were put together in their proper posi- 
tion, the length from the tip of the lower jaw to the mid-point of 
the tail was 15 feet 8 inches. The shape of the tail and flipper 
closely corresponded with the Ziphioid which Burmeister has named 
Epiodon patachonicum or australe {Ziphius cavirostris). The tail was 
dark slate grey, almost black on both surfaces. The flipper on both 
surfaces had the colour of a well-blackened boot. A pair of mandi- 
bular teeth projected for one inch beyond the gum, but no rudi- 
mentary denticles were seen. The blow-hole was transverse, and on 
the surface of the head was not divided into two nostrils. The 
position and form of the tongue, the relation of the larynx to the 
nares, and the branching of the trachea and bronchi, were ex- 
amined. 
The stomach was seen to consist of ten compartments, viz., a 
proximal cavity, which freely communicated with the oesophagus ; 
eight globular or saccular compartments, which varied in size from 
a moderately sized orange to about three times that magnitude. The 
first saccular compartment communicated with the hinder end of the 
proximal cavity, and the various saccular compartments communi- 
cated in succession with each other, whilst the last one opened into 
the tenth compartment of the stomach. 
The tenth or distal compartment was in size and shape not unlike 
a large human stomach ; it showed an indication of a division into 
two parts by a projecting fold of mucous membrane which passed 
across it; it communicated with the duodenum. A large duct opened 
into the duodenum which was traced to the pancreas, and probably 
represented the combined pancreatic and biliary duct. The compart- 
