1. Neobalæna marginata. B.M. Balæna marginata, _Gray_, _Cat. Seals & Whales Brit. Mus._ p. 90; _Hector_, _Proc. & Trans. of the New-Zealand Institute_, 1869, t. 2 B. f. 1-4; _Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist._ 1870, v. p. 221, and vi. p. 155, figs. 1 & 2. Inhab. New Zealand; Island of Kawau (_Sir G. Grey_). Mus. Wellington. In width and general form the beak of the skull is somewhat like the beak of some of the Finner Whales; but it does not at all justify Mr. Knox’s idea that _Balæna marginata_ is a Finner. But this difference of skull makes us more anxious to have the description of the entire animal and its skeleton, as the animal may prove to be the type of a new family of Whales, between the true Whales and Finners. This pigmy whale, which is not more than 15 or 16 feet long, is a representative in the Southern Ocean of the gigantic Right Whale of the Greenland seas. It has the most beautiful, the most flexible, most elastic, and the toughest whalebone or baleen yet discovered; and if this were of larger size, it would fetch a much higher price than the whalebone of the Greenland Whale, the latter being three or four times the value of the brittle coarse whalebone of the _Eubalænæ_ or Right Whales of the Southern and Pacific Oceans. The trade of the Continental nations being chiefly confined to their colonies, or their merchants obtaining the whalebone that is used in their manufactures second-hand, there are not in the market the varieties of whalebone and finner-bone which we have in this country, where the whalebone and finner-bone from different localities bear each a different value. This perhaps explains why the Continental zoologists (as Eschricht) who have paid attention to the structure of whales have not paid sufficient attention to the characters afforded by the shape, structure, and colour of this substance, to which I called their attention more than twenty years ago, and showed its value as a character for distinguishing the genera and species. It has been a fertile subject of reproach to me that I established some species on the characters afforded by this substance; but I need only mention, as a proof of the little attention Van Beneden has paid to this part of my work, that in his book on the anatomy of Whales, now in progress, after saying that I have established the species _Balæna marginata_ on three blades of whalebone, he says I have called it _Eubalæna marginata_, thus confounding it with the Whales with brittle and coarse whalebone—whereas the chief reason that induced me to consider the blades to belong to a distinct species was their very fine and tough structure. The accuracy of the determination is now proved by the very different form of its skull from that of any other known Whale. In the same manner, the _Physalus antarcticus_, also established on finner-bone or baleen imported from New Zealand, has been proved to be a very