96 
WHALE ROOM. 
the organ of smell, though small, is formed as in other 
Mammals. The two halves of the lower jaw are curved out- 
wards in the middle, and loosely connected both to the skull 
behind and to each other in front by fibrous bands. When the 
mouth is open in feeding, they fall outwards, widening the 
capacious bag formed by the dilateable skin of the throat (the 
power of distention of which is aided in many species by a 
series of longitudinal folds), which may be compared to the 
pouch under the beak of the Pelican. By their rotation 
upwards and inwards wPen the mouth is closed, they are 
brought close to the upper jaw. The sternum, or breast-bone, 
is composed of a single piece, often taking the form of a cross, 
and articulating only with a single pair of ribs. There are 
never any bony sternal ribs joining the breast-bone. 
In the Right-Whales, Balcena, the skin of the throat is 
smooth, and not furrowed ; there is no back-fin ; the neck- 
vertebrae are united into a single mass ; and the fore-limb 
is broad and short, with five fingers. The head is very large, 
and the whalebone very long and narrow, highly elastic and 
black, as seen in the specimens on the wall at the north-west 
corner of the gallery. 
This genus contains the well-known Greenland Right-Whale 
{Balcena my sticetus) of the Arctic seas, which yields whalebone 
of the greatest A*alue and train-oil. As it never leaves the ice, 
it is not an inhabitant of the seas round our islands. It used 
to be hunted every summer in Baffin Bay and the seas round 
Spitsbergen by ships fitted out at Dundee and Peterhead. 
The Museum at present only possesses a skull of this interesting- 
species ; but a carefully executed coloured model, on the scale 
of one inch to the foot, presented by Captain D. Gray, gives- 
a good idea of its external appearance. 
Besides the Greenland Right- Whale there are other members 
of the same genus, distinguished by having heads somewhat 
smaller in proportion to the body, with shorter whalebone and 
a larger number of vertebrje. These inhabit the temperate 
seas of both northern and southern hemispheres ; and, although 
divided into species, in accordance with their geographical 
distribution (such as B. hiscayensis of the North Atlantic, 
