244 TlMEHRI. 
placental mammals of carnivorous habit, and they form 
the order Cetacea. In some forms, teeth are well- 
developed ; in others, the palate is provided with closely- 
placed vertical plates which furnish the whale-bone of 
commerce. Whales are fished for not only for the purposes 
of making whale-oil, but also of obtaining the substances 
spermaceti and ambergris. They are the largest of all 
animals, ranging to as much as from eighty to one 
hundred feet in length ; but the size of the oesophagus in 
these great brutes is abnormally small, and their food 
consists of small fishes and crustaceans, soft molluscs, 
marine worms, and other small surface organisms, which 
alone they are able to swallow. 
In the next case, the first upright case, are exhibited 
specimens of foreign birds for comparison with the 
colonial birds. Unfortunately, as in the foreign mammals, 
the types are badly chosen, a very large proportion being 
of very closely allied families, and many even of the 
same genera and species The specimens, however, are 
very fine ones. 
Among them are to be found very interesting speci- 
mens, especially interesting in the contrast which they 
present with the birds of the colony. In the under part of 
the case is seen a large series of specimens of the horn- 
bills (Buceros), African and Asiatic birds in which the 
bills are extremely enlarged, one bill, as it were, piled 
upon another, rivalling and doubling the size of the 
largest bills of the colonial toucans. As in the toucans, 
this large bill is filled up with an open cellular tissue, 
which renders the large mass extremely light. By these 
is seen a specimen of the crested or crowned crane 
(Balearica pavoninaj remarkable for its crown of 
