name, as well as the SUN AND WHALEBONE at Latton, have taken their designation; for the sign is a very uncommon one in the adjoining counties, and does not appear at all in London. The house in question originally took its name from two whale’s jaw-bones (not _rib_-bones, as is commonly supposed) set up in the form of an archway over the road close at hand. Local tradition says that the bones were those of a whale that was stranded in the Thames near Dagenham during the great storm that prevailed on the night preceding September 3, 1658, when Oliver Cromwell died. This was, perhaps, the case, as “Ye Whalebone” is marked against the tenth milestone from London on the map of the high-road from London to Harwich, given in Ogilby’s _Itinerarium Angliæ_, published in 1675, only seventeen years after the whale is said to have been stranded. Also in Dr. Howell’s _Ancient and Present State of England_, first published in 1678, it is stated (6th Ed. p. 263) that, “near about this time [1658], there came up the Thames as far as Greenwich a whale of very great length and bigness.” Daniel Defoe, too, in his _Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain_, first published in 1724, says (vol. i. p. 3) the WHALEBONE was “so called because the rib-bone of a large Whale, taken in the River of Thames, was fixed there in 1658, the year Oliver Cromwell died, for a monument of that monstrous creature, it being at first about Eight and Twenty Foot long.” The WHALE’S BONE is also marked on _Andrew and Drury’s Map of Essex_, published in 1777. That a storm of most unusual magnitude did rage on the night in question, is certain. Prideaux, in his _Introduction to History_ (1682), speaks of “that most horrid tempestuous night which ushered in this day [on which Cromwell died].” Pepys also mentions the storm. Nor is it anything new for whales and similar animals to appear in the Thames. In Sir Richard Baker’s _Chronicles of the Kings of England_ (p. 425), published in 1684, it is recorded that on the 19th of January, 1606, “a great Porpus was taken at West Ham, in a small creek a mile and a half within the land; and within a few days after a Whale came up within eight miles of London, whose body was seen divers times above the water, and was judged to exceed the length of the largest ship in the River: but when she tasted the fresh water and scented the land, she returned again into the sea.” On the morning of April 31, 1879, too, a whale alarmed some fishermen by his spouting near Hole Haven. Many other records might be cited. It is, however, a curious circumstance that in M. J. Farmer’s _History of Waltham Abbey_, published in 1735, there is given as an appendix “The Inquisition taken the 17th of King Charles I. [1642] of a Perambulation of Waltham Forest in the County of Essex,” in which occurs the following passage:--[The Forest boundary runs] “from Great Ilford directly by the same King’s High Way leading towards Rumford, to a certain _Quadrivium_