PSEUDORCA CRASSIDENS. 
193 
not proceeded so far as might have been expected. After two days’ rather hard work, the skeleton, 
defective only in some comparatively unimportant parts, 1 was ready to be sent away, and with a 
readiness of which I wish to express my sincere acknowledgment, Mr. Earner added to all the other 
assistance he so liberally had afforded me still another kindness, in ordering the skeleton to be 
brought to Kallundborg by his own conveyance, thence to be sent by sea to Copenhagen. Eat as to 
the appearance and colour of the animal, as it was before the blubber had been cut off, the informa¬ 
tion obtained here at Refsnses, was as defective as that formerly received at Asnaes. Not even 
the sex could be discovered. The people who had found the dolphin could say nothing about it, 
and in the buried carcass no distinguishable trace of external or internal sexual organs were to be 
found ; in the flensing, the external sexual parts, as well as the pelvic bones, had been cut off, 
and the internal parts were so much decomposed that an examination of them gave no 
result. Lastly, the third carcass w r as thrown ashore some days before Whitsuntide, near the 
small town of Middelfart, in Funen. A physician of this town had, immediately after the stranding, 
informed Professor Eschricht of this event, and at his request sent him the nearly complete 
skeleton, which my illustrious friend had the great kindness to leave at my disposal, being informed 
that I had availed myself of the opportunity afforded me by the stranding of the two other indi¬ 
viduals, to subject this remarkable Cetacean to a detailed examination. This third individual 
was almost full-grown, as was sufficiently proved by the skeleton, and the donor stated that it 
was a male, but we received no further particulars about it. Thus it is only by the skeleton that 
we have to decide which dolphin it is that in these three cases had been thrown up on our shores, 
but, fortunately, we need nothing more to settle the question. 
That it is none of the larger species hitherto described from the North Sea and the northern 
part of the Atlantic cannot possibly be doubted; even a slight glance at the figures given in 
the following pages of the cranium and the pectoral fin will immediately be sufficient to prove 
that it cannot be any of the Northern species of Orca; no more can it be the Globiocephalus 
incrassatus , 2 a species founded lately on an incomplete cranium, still less the common 
ca’ing-whale, or pilot-whale, Globiocephalus melas, nor finally, the Delphinus griseus of Cuvier, 
hitherto observed in some few cases, the type of the genus Grampus of Gray. Another form, 
however, very peculiar and different from all these more or less well-known large, few-toothed 
species has lately been observed in our Northern seas; for on the 24th of November, 1801, a 
considerable shoal of very large dolphins arrived at dawn in the Bay of Kiel. Some fishermen 
and sailors in boats succeeded in separating about thirty head from the rest of the shoal, and in 
driving them up into the harbour itself, where one was killed, but the rest contrived to escape 
again in spite of all pains taken to drive them on shore. The dolphin killed, a female, sixteen 
feet long, was exhibited at Kiel, and other places in Holstein, and bought for the anatomical 
collection of the University of Kiel. No complete description of it has hitherto been published, 
and of its skeleton, especially, we have no account; but some information, scanty enough it is 
true, about the appearance and teeth of the captured dolphin, is to be found in a short 
account of the whole event, which Dr. Mobius has given in the periodical, ‘ Der Zoologische 
1 Besides the pelvic bones, only the three last caudal vertebrae and the right pectoral fin were 
wanting, the last had most probably been carried away by foxes, which had dug a way down to the 
carcass; the caudal vertebrae, with the greater part of the caudal fin, seem to have been absent even 
at the time when the dolphin was found drifting in the sea. 
2 ‘ Proceedings of the Zool. Soc. of London/ 1861, p. 309. 
25 
