192 
REINHARDT ON 
hagen by Mr. Rdrbye, a medical student, who, rvhile passing his vacation in the neighbourhood of 
Asnaes, had gone to see the dolphin a short time after it had been thrown up on the beach. The 
sight of the tooth immediately convinced me that the stranded Cetacean could not belong to any 
of our species of Orca, but that it must be an animal of which it was important to save even 
any fragments and detached pieces, and being told at the same time that Count Lerche had 
caused the carcass to be buried, I applied to him, with a request that the body might be 
disinterred, so that the bones might be put together to form a skeleton as complete as circum¬ 
stances would admit of. On arriving at Lerchenborg, I was received most kindly by Count 
Lerche, who afforded me all the assistance I wanted; but the more accurate accounts I 
now received at the place itself, I regret to say, in no slight degree diminished the hopes on 
which my visit was founded. The dolphin had, indeed, been interred, but for the purpose of its 
being employed as manure, and on account of its considerable weight, and with a view of ren¬ 
dering the work easier, it had first been hewn into many pieces, which then had been spread over 
rather a large piece of ground, where it would be difficult to find them again. At the same 
time, however, it was some comfort to me to hear that (as I had rightly concluded) it would not 
have availed much if I had set out somewhat earlier, for the dolphin had been found on 
the 9th of August, and had already been cut to pieces on the lltli of the same month, 
several days before the news of its stranding had reached Copenhagen, and the chopping had 
been carried out so unsparingly, that the head itself had been divided in the middle, and many of 
the vertebrae had been split. It soon became evident to me that I must give up the hope of 
collecting fragments enough for forming a tolerably complete skeleton, but, thanks to the assist¬ 
ance given to me, I succeeded, nevertheless, in finding the most important parts, and among 
these more especially the fragments of the cranium, the cervical vertebrae, the scapulae, the 
bones of the arms and some vertebrae. But as to the verbal information I tried to elicit from 
those who had seen the animal, as it lay upon the shore, I was not particularly successful; 
the only thing I could learn with tolerable certainty was, that it was a female nineteen feet long— 
a little longer, therefore, than it had originally been stated to be. But as to its appearance and 
colour, the statements were contradictory. 
Thus, while the information about this individual remained in an unsatisfactory state, I 
received during my stay at Lerchenborg another valuable piece of intelligence—that some time 
before another great dolphin had been drifted dead on the shoal, close to the shore near the light¬ 
house of Refsnaes, some few miles from Asnaes ; that it had been saved, and that the carcass had 
remained lying on the beach, the blubber having been cut off and melted into about ten gallons 
of oil. Circumstances did not permit me to go immediately from Asnaes to Refsnaes. I was 
obliged to return to town first ; but having by renewed inquiries ascertained the trustworthiness 
of the intelligence, and obtained such information as rendered it not improbable that it might oe 
a dolphin of the same species as the one stranded at Asnaes, I accepted the hospitable invitation 
of Mr. Barner, the owner of a farm in the neighbourhood, and early in October I went there 
accompanied by the conservator of the museum. I found the animal, of which by far the greater 
part of the flesh was still adhering to the bones, lying buried in the neighbourhood of the light¬ 
house at the foot of the sand-hills on the sea-shore, and covered with sand; to my satisfaction it 
really proved to be of the same species as the dolphin stranded at Asnaes, though indeed a 
smaller individual, being only about fourteen feet long; and although it had been found as early as 
the * lonth of June (as I was told), or more than three months before, yet the putrefaction had 
