channel lying between the tongue and the lower jaw. When the month is opened, their elasticity causes them to straighten out like a bow unbent, so that at whatever distance the jaws are separated the strainer remains in perfect action, filling the whole of the interval. The mechanical perfection of the arrangement is completed by the great development of the lower lip, which rises stiffly above the jaw-bone and prevents the long, slender, flexible ends of the baleen from being carried outwards by the rush of water from the mouth, when its cavity is being diminished by the closure of the jaws and raising of the tongue. If, as appears highly probable, the “bowhead” of the Okhotsk Sea and Behring Strait belongs to this species, its range is circumpolar. Though found in the seas on both sides of Greenland, and passing freely from one to the other, it is never seen so far south as Cape Farewell; but on the Labrador coast, where a cold stream sets down from the north, its range is somewhat farther. In the Behring Sea, according to Scammon, “it is seldom seen south of the fifty-fifth parallel, which is about the farthest southern extent of the winter ice, while on the Sea of Okhotsk its southern limit is about the latitude of 54°.” As has been abundantly shown by Eschricht and Reinhardt in the case of the Greenland seas, “everything tends to prove,” Scammon says, “that the _Balæna mysticetus_ is truly an ‘ice whale,’ for among the scattered floes, or about the borders of the ice-fields or barriers, is its home and feeding-ground. It is true that these animals are pursued in the open water during the summer months; but in no instance have we learned of their being captured south of where winter ice-fields are occasionally met with.” The occurrence of this species, therefore, on the British or any European coast is exceedingly unlikely, as when alive and in health the southern limit of its range in the North Sea has been ascertained to be from the east coast of Greenland at 64° N. lat. along the north of Iceland towards Spitsbergen, and a glance at a physical chart will show that there are no currents setting southwards which could bear a disabled animal or a floating carcase to British shores. To this _à priori_ improbability may be added the fact that no authentic instance has been recorded of the capture or stranding of this species upon any European coast; for the cases in which it has been reported as seen in British waters may be explained by the supposition of one of the other species of the genus being mistaken for it. Still, as two other essentially Arctic Cetaceans, the Narwhal and the Beluga, have in a few undoubted instances found their way to British shores, it would be rash absolutely to deny the possibility of the Greenland Right Whale doing the same. [Illustration: FIG. 77.—Southern Right Whale (_Balæna australis_).]