306 MR. T. SOUTHWELL ON ANCIENT RECORDS OF CETACEANS. 
On reading this accurate description of the animal and the 
circumstantial account of its cutting up and disposal, one cannot 
help being struck with excellence of the one, differing as it does 
diametrically from the vague and worthless descriptions of stranded 
Cetaceans we are accustomed to read in the present day, which 
appear carefully to pass over every feature helpful for their identifi- 
cation — w'hilst the methodical way in which the “making off” was 
proceeded with wms worthy of an experienced whaler, not to mention 
the business-like profit and loss account, all of which tend to 
emphasize what we know to have been the case, that Sir Hamon 
was no ordinary man but, in addition to his thoroughly practical 
business habits, an accurate observer, gifted with the power of 
recording what he saw, as wdtness his remarkable account of the 
Dodo, which he saw exhibited in London about the year 1638. 
In the postscript of a letter to le Strange dated 11th June, 1653, 
Sir Thomas Browne asks for further information with regard to this 
whale ; this was embodied in a long and learned critique, on the 
Pseudodoxia, filling 85 pp., which. Sir Hamon sent him (Sloane 
MSS., in the Brit. Mus. No. 1839), on the 27th page of which the 
writer states that the Whale “was of ye kind called a Jobertus, or 
Woolpack, a male 57 feet long, and of a very great girth of body, 
46 teeth.” It is in this lengthy critique that the account of his 
visit to the Dodo, before referred to, is contained. 
With regard to the name applied to this specimen, Mr. le Strange 
tells me that in the manuscript a blank space was left for its 
insertion, as was also done for certain measurements, which were 
never filled up, and that the name does not completely fill the 
space. It was probably called a Woolpack Whale, from its 
apparently ungainly proportions, especially when lying on the shore 
distended wdth gas, but the name, “Jobertus,” is most likely 
a varient of “ Gubartes,” “ Gibbartas,” or “Jupiter fish,” which 
Anderson subsequently, in his ‘History of Iceland and Greenland 1 
(1747, p. 220), applied to one of the Fin-whales, probably 
Balcenoptera rout rata, judging from his description, especially that 
of its baleen which he says is short, white, and brittle. It would be 
interesting to discover le Strange’s authority, for the name which 
he evidently misapplies, but unless it were inserted in the blank 
space left for it long after the MS. was written its application 
would be earlier than Anderson’s time, w’hich was 120 years later. 
