General Observations on the Balænidæ.

The entire form of the animals so nearly resembles a fish, as to lead the naturalist, and practical whaler, to insist that the Cetaceæ are fishes; nothing but the researches of the anatomist could have rescued the whale from that class.

The exhibition of the great Rorqual, at the Royal Institution, in 1835, was considered by the great mass of the visitors, as a sheer imposition. They wished to see the skin stuffed. The baleen (in that case in sitû) was disbelieved to be a reality by most persons who visited the exhibition. One or two persons actually demanded a return of the admission fee. Yet to the anatomist, the contemplation of the spinal column (trunk) composed of sixty-five vertebræ (out of many of which the entire skeleton of the ox could have been fashioned), and these connected by sixty-five joints, many of them containing a gallon of joint-oil, presented a lever, or rather a whip-shaft, to the tail, which left no doubt of the effects of the application of its distal extremity to a whale-boat.

I remember a whaler of the name of Thoms, residing on the Island of Kapiti, who was merely touched by the tail of a Mysticete, and nearly every bone on one side of the body was broken. Fortunately, there was no “duly qualified doctor” to be had, and Thoms consequently got quite well, with the exception of a slight lameness. When brought to the station, he was lifted out of the boat with considerable difficulty, being literally glued to the boat by the blood lost.

The sternum, also, is remarkably short, having only two or three pairs of ribs connected to it. Now, this, instead of indicating a rudimentary condition, rather proved the Divine perfection in all nature's works. In consequence of the smallness of the sternum, the great respiratory muscle— the diaphragm—measured in the great Rorqual, 60 feet in length, by an