16 
undue i^ersecution has become comparatively very rare. I refer to 
the Arctic Right Whale, which, hut for the protection afforded it 
by its extreme northern habitat, would long ago have been exter- 
minated. As it is, the greatest hope of the species lingering on is 
that it may from its scarcity not pay for the heavy outlay incurred 
in its pursuit ; but although avc have not actually lost the Arctic 
Right Whale as a species, it is to be feared that a smaller Avhale- 
bone whale, the Atlantic Right Whale, Avhich formerly frequented 
the temperate regions of the Atlantic and North Sea, has now 
ceased to exist. Of this creatiire, once finding employment for so 
many hardy seamen from the Biscayan ports, the only remains 
known to exist are the cervical vertebras, dredged up off Lyme 
Regis, now in the British iSfuseum, and the skeleton of a young one 
Avhicli was killed in the harbour of St. Sebastian in 1854, and is 
noAv in the Copenhagen l\'Iuseura. The mother was Avith the 
young one but effected her escape. Unless the Avhale taken in the 
^Mediterranean near Taranto, in 1877, belonged to this species, that 
taken at St. Sebastian is the only specimen Avhich has come under 
the notice of a naturalist, and the species may almost be said to 
have been lost before it Avas knoAvn to exist. 
So little, hoAvever, do Ave knoAV of the inhabitants of the 
trackless ocean that it behoves us to speak Avith extreme 
caution for even great herds of a supposed extinct species may 
be roaming its depths unsuspected, till accident brings them 
to our notice. Such an instance occurred in November 1861, 
Avhen there entered the Bay of Kiel a large shoal of Dolphins, 
of a species knoAvn to science only by an imperfect skeleton, found 
in a sub-fossil condition beneath the peat in a Lincolnshire fen. 
Thirty of them Avere separated from the shoal, but only one 
Avas captured ; this, hoAvever, AV'as quite sufficient to identify the 
species Avith the form already described by OAven under the name 
of Phocmia crassidens from the Lincolnshire remains. In the 
folloAving summer three other individuals, presumably from the 
same shoal, Avere throAvn ashore on the north-west coast of Zealand. 
But for the accident of the entanglement of this herd of groat 
beasts (varying from 16 to 19 feet in length) in the shoals, from 
