Dr. Robert Brown, who communicated to the Zoological Society, in May, 1868, a valuable series of observations on the mammals of Greenland, made during his voyages to the Spitzbergen, Iceland, and Jan Mayen Seas, and along the eastern and western shores of Davis's Strait and Baffin's Bay to near the mouth of Smith's Sound, remarks, in a chapter on the Right whale (_Balaena mysticetus_):--"The 'blowing,' so familiar a feature of the _Cetacea_, but especially of the _Mysticetus_ is, quite analogous to the breathing of the higher mammals, and the blow-holes are the homologues of the nostrils. It is most erroneously stated that the whale ejects water from the blow-holes. I have been many times only a few feet from a whale when 'blowing,' and, though purposely observing it, could never see that it ejected from its nostrils anything but the ordinary breath--a fact which might almost have been deduced from analogy. In the cold arctic air this breath is generally condensed, and falls upon those close at hand in the form of a dense spray which may have led seamen to suppose that this vapour was originally ejected in the form of water. Occasionally, when the whale blows just as it is rising out of or sinking in the sea, a little of the superincumbent water may be forced upwards by the column of breath. When the whale is wounded in the lungs, or in any of the blood-vessels immediately supplying them, blood, as might be expected, is ejected in the death-throes along with the breath. When the whaleman sees his prey 'spouting red,' he concludes that its end is not far distant; it is then mortally wounded." Captain F. C. Hall, the commander of the unfortunate "Polaris" Expedition, thus describes, in his 'Life with the Esquimaux,' the spout of a whale:--"What this blowing is like," he says, "may be described by asking if the reader has ever seen the smoke produced by the firing of an old-fashioned flint-lock. If so, then he may understand the 'blow' of a whale--a flash in the pan and all is over." Captain Scammon, an experienced American whaling captain, who, like Scoresby, could wield well both harpoon and pen, in his fine work on 'The Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of America,' writes to the same effect.