Of these the first in eminence and of importance to our commerce, is the _Balæna mysticetus_, the common or Greenland whale. This animal is productive of more oil than any other of the cetacea, and being less active, slower in its motion, and more timid than any other of its kind, of similar, or nearly similar, magnitude, it is more easily captured. Its size has been much overrated, and, in his excellent natural history of cetaceous animals, La Cepède has been guilty of considerable exaggeration. In the age when whales were regarded with superstitious dread, it is easy to conceive that the dimensions of an animal inhabiting an element in which it cannot easily be measured, would be recorded with extravagance. Authors of the first respectability in the present day give a length of eighty to one hundred feet to the mysticetus, and remark with unqualified assertion, that when the captures were less frequent, and the animals had sufficient time to attain their full growth, specimens were found of one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet in length, or even longer; and some ancient naturalists, indeed, have gone so far as to assert, that whales had been seen of above nine hundred feet in length. In the present day, however, it is certain that they are by no means so bulky. Of three hundred and twenty-two individuals, in the capture of which I have been personally concerned, no one, I believe, exceeded sixty feet in length, and the largest I ever measured was fifty-eight feet, from one extremity to the other, being one of the largest to appearance which I ever saw. An uncommon whale that was caught near Spitzbergen, about twenty years ago, the whalebone of which measured almost fifteen feet, was not, I understand, so much as seventy feet in length; and the longest actual measurement that I have met with, or heard of, is given by sir Charles Giesecké, who informs us, that in the spring of 1813, a whale was killed at Godhaven of the length of sixty-seven feet. These, however, are very uncommon instances. I therefore conceive that sixty feet may be considered as the size of the larger animals of this species, and sixty-five feet in length as a magnitude which very rarely occurs. I believe, too, that whales are now met with of as large dimensions as at any former period since the commencement of the whale-fishery; a point which, I think, can be established from various historical records.