FIN-WHALES. 
123 
and often stranded on some part of the English coast. The very 
complete skeleton of a perfectly full-grown animal^ 68 feet long 
measured in a straight line_, from the Moray Erith^ Scotland, 
where it was captured in 1882, shows extremely well the osteo- 
logical characters of this group of Whales, even to the small pelvic 
bone and rudimentary nodule representing the femur or thigh- 
bone. The baleen or whalebone is in place in the mouth, and 
the flukes of the tail and the dorsal fln are also preserved, and 
suspended near their original position. On the left side of the 
room, near the windows, is the skeleton of a very young animal, 
taken on the coast of North Wales in 1846, the difi’erent form of 
the bones of which, owing to their incomplete development, caused 
it formerly to be taken for a distinct species. 
Balanoptera borealis is a well-marked species, intermediate in 
size between the last and the following. The skeleton exhibited is 
from an animal taken near Goole in Yorkshire, in September 1884. 
A fourth species, not uncommon on the English coast, is the 
small Balcenoptera rostrata, which never reaches 30 feet in length. 
Beside a skeleton from Greenland is another from New Zealand 
(B. huttonii), which resembles it so closely that it is diflScult to 
assign any distinctive characters to it except the colour of the 
whalebone, which, of a creamy white in the Northern, is almost 
black in the Southern form. Much information is still required 
before we can determine the limits of the geographical distribution 
and variation of the various kinds of Whales, and more especially 
do we need a larger number of specimens for study and comparison 
before many important problems relating to their natural history 
can be solved. 
