MR. T. SOUTHWELL ON ANCIENT RECORPS OF CETACEANS. 307 
This specimen, although the first instance of the stranding of 
the Sperm Whale on the Norfolk coast of which we have a complete 
account, is by no means the first which had occurred, in fact, 
from the middle of the sixteenth to the midtile of the eighteenth 
century, many such events in European waters are to be found 
recorded ; and an early example must have been the Cachalot, of 
which the base of the skull, used as a chair, is preserved in 
St. Nicholas’s Church, Great Yarmouth, and for the painting of 
which a charge of five shillings is made in the Churchwardens’ 
accounts in the year 1600. Restricting ourselves to our own 
county we find some twenty years later than the Holme Whale, 
Sir Thomas Browne mentions that a larger individual of the same 
species was stranded near Wells, and it is probable this latter 
individual led to the chapter in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, devoted 
to the Spermaceti Whale ; the date of the occurrence of this latter 
example, of which I can find no further particulars, would probably 
be about the year 1G4G. Another Sperm Whale seems to have 
occurred at Yarmouth, about the year 1652, for there is a letter 
from Sir Thomas Browne (Sloane, MSS. 1847, fol. 56), evidently 
(from the date of the reply) written in that year; asking a corres- 
pondent to obtain from Mr. Arthur Bacon of that town, the 
particulars with regard to the [Sperm] Whale whereof he had the 
cutting up and disposal. 
The statement by Sir Thomas Browne when writing of the Sperm 
Whale (Sloane, MSS. 1830, fol. 23), that eight or nine of these 
animals came ashore on one occasion on the Norfolk coast, and that 
two of them “ had young ones after they were forsaken by the 
water,” has always appeared very doubtful, as it would indicate 
that a “school” of adult females had wandered out of their proper 
latitude, whereas I believe the stragglers which have been met 
with in our waters have been, almost invariably, solitary males or 
herds of young males ; a letter from Browne to Sir William Dugdale 
( vide Notes on the Nat. Hist, of Norf., p. 92) however throws 
a fresh light on the subject, for he there states that these were 
“ a kind of small Whale . . . which seamen call a Grampus,” the 
name applied by le Strange to the Beaked Whale ( H>/perr>ndnn ), the 
subject of the next extract from the manuscript, and much more 
likely animals to perform such a feat. The only instance of 
the occurrence of females, or a mixture of sexes in the same 
“school” known to me is mentioned by Anderson ( I.c . p. 248), 
