Under the date of 875, in a book entitled the “Translation and Miracles of St. Vaast,” mention is made of the whale-fishery on the French coast. In the “Life of St. Arnould, bishop of Soissons,” a work of the eleventh century, particular mention is made of the fishery by the harpoon, on the occasion of a miracle said to have been performed by the saint. There are also different authorities for supposing that a whale-fishery was carried on near the coast of Normandy and Flanders, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The English, it is to be expected, did not remain long behind their continental neighbours in this lucrative pursuit. It is difficult to determine whether the whales referred to in the few early documents which we possess, were such as were run on the English shore by accident, or subdued by the English on the high sea. By Acts of Parliament, A.D. 1315 and 1324, the wrecks of whales, cast by chance upon the shore, or whales or great sturgeons _taken_ in the sea, were to belong to the king. Henry IV. gave, in 1415, to the church of Rochester, the tithe of the whales taken along the shores of that bishopric. In the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of the shores of the Bay of Biscay were the most distinguished whale-fishers. At first, they confined their attacks to those animals, probably the _Balæna rostrata_ of Linnæus, which used to present themselves in the Bay of Biscay at a certain season every year. Gradually becoming bolder, the Biscayans advanced towards the coasts of Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, in the pursuit. The Icelanders united their energies with the Biscayans, and conducted the whale-fishery on so extensive a scale, that, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the number of vessels annually employed by the united nations amounted to a fleet of fifty or sixty sail. The first attempt of the English to capture the whale, of which we have any satisfactory account, was made in the year 1594. Different ships were fitted out for Cape Breton at the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, part of which were destined for the walrus-fishery, and the remainder for the whale-fishery. The Grace, of Bristol, one of these vessels, took on board 700 or 800 whale-fins, or laminæ of whalebone, which they found in the Bay of St. George, where two large Biscayan fishermen had been wrecked three years before. This is the first notice I have met with of the importation of this article into Great Britain.