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Show 1873.] DR. J. E. GRAY ON NEW-ZEALAND WHALES. 133 flat. There is no doubt that this bone is in progress of development; for the terminal edge is very thick and truncated. (See fig. 4, p. 140.) The history of the New-Zealand Right Whales is an instructive lesson to the zoologist, and shows how apt we are to trust to an assumption. The older circumnavigators, as Capt. Cook and others, spoke of a Right Whale being observed near New Zealand. Dr. Dieffenbach brought home with him a beautiful drawing of a Right Whale, made from a female specimen 60 feet long taken on the coast of N e w Zealand, in Jackson's Bay. I published a reduced copy of this drawing in his work on N e w Zealand under the name of Baleena antipodarum, and a plate in the *• Voyage of the Erebus and Terror' under the name of Baleena antarctica, a name which had been already used for another species by Lesson and Owen. Mr. Stuart presented to the Museum the ear-bone of a Whale from Otago, which I described and figured in the P. Z. S. 1864, p. 202, under the name of Caperea. This figure is copied in the * Catalogue of Seals and Whales,' p. 101, f. 9; and believing that there was only one Right Whale in N e w Zealand, I regarded it as the ear-bone of the Whale I had figured, and called it Caperea antipodarum*. The skeleton of an adult female Whale, obtained by Capt. Berard in the Bay of Acaroa, near Banks Island, in N e w Zealand, was presented to the Paris Museum. According to M . van Beneden it was for a long time kept in the warehouse of the Institution, and regarded as of the same species as the Baleena australis brought from the Cape of Good Hope by Lalande ; and M . Laurillard was so persuaded of its identity that he offered to exchange it with M . Eschricht for the skeleton of a Greenland Whale (Ost. Cet. p. 46). It is exhibited in the court of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes, and named B. australis. Prof. Lilljeborg, who was in Paris in 1863, says that the specimen was not setup ; but it has since (1865) been mounted, according to Mr. Flower. Prof. Lilljeborg, in a letter to me, printed in the additions to the 'Catalogue of Seals and Whales,' observes that " it is quite different from the B. australis of Desmoulins and Cuvier, from the Cape, and is, without doubt, the Eubalcena antipodarum of Gray. The blade-bone is of very distinct form, and has the rudiment of an acromion. The ear-bones are lost,"-one of these being the single bone upon which the genus and species were established. M . van Beneden, who speaks of this skeleton as complete, in the ' Osteographie des Cetaces,' adopts Lilljeborg's determination, and figures several bones, no doubt taken from the specimen in the Jardin des Plantes, under the name of Baleena antipodarum, not saying a word as to the skeleton being without the ear-bones, but giving three figures of two ear-bones, evidently derived from other sources. He says he has seen several ear-bones of this species, and that they are all alike. He also says there are three ear-bones in the Museum of Brussels (one of them being young), brought from * Dr. Hector has now determined that this ear-bone belongs to Neobalcena marginata (Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 1873, vol. xi. p. 108). |
