The southern Right Whale (_B. australis_, Fig. 77) resembles the last in the absence of dorsal fin and of longitudinal furrows in the skin of the throat and chest, but differs in that it possesses a smaller head in proportion to its body, shorter baleen, a different shaped contour of the upper margin of the lower lip, and a greater number (fifteen) of ribs and dorsal vertebræ. This form inhabits the temperate seas of both northern and southern hemispheres, and is divided into several so-called species, according to their geographical distribution:—_B. biscayensis_ of the North Atlantic, _B. japonica_ of the North Pacific, _B. australis_ of the South Atlantic, and _B. antipodarum_ and _B. novæ-zealandiæ_ of the South Pacific. The differential characters by which they have been separated, external as well as anatomical, are, however, slight and subject to individual variation; and the number of specimens available for comparison in museums is not yet sufficient to afford the necessary data to determine whether these characters can be regarded as specific or not. The most interesting of these is the Atlantic Right Whale, which was formerly abundant in the North Atlantic, but is now so scarce as to appear verging on extinction. This was the Whale the pursuit of which gave occupation to a numerous population on the shores of the Basque provinces of France and Spain in the Middle Ages. From the tenth to the sixteenth centuries Bayonne, Biarritz, St. Jean de Luz, and San Sebastian, as well as numerous other towns on the north coast of Spain, were the centres of an active Whale “fishery,” which supplied Europe with oil and whalebone. In later times these Whales were pursued as far as the coast of Newfoundland. They were, however, already getting scarce when the voyages undertaken towards the close of the sixteenth century for the discovery of the north-eastern route to China and the East Indies opened out the seas around Spitzbergen; then for the first time the existence of the Greenland Whale became known, and henceforth the energies of the European whale-fishers were concentrated upon that animal. It is a singular fact that the existence of the Atlantic Right Whale was quite overlooked by naturalists till lately, all accounts referring to it being attributed to the Greenland Whale, supposed once to have had a wider distribution than now, and to have been driven by the persecution of man to its present circumpolar haunts. To the two Danish cetologists Eschricht and Reinhardt is due the credit of having proved its existence as a distinct species, from a careful collation of numerous historical notices of its structure, distribution, and habits; and their restoration of the animal, founded upon these documents, has been abundantly confirmed by the capture of various specimens in recent times, showing that it still lingers in some of the localities where it formerly was so abundant. The only known instances of its occurrence on the coasts