It seems to me that from these incidents we may draw the conclusion that great whales in Alexander's time were exceedingly rare in the sea which surrounds Greece, and in Burrough's time in that which washes the shores of England. Quite otherwise was the whale regarded on Spitzbergen some few years after Burrough's voyage by the Dutch and English whalers. At the sight of a whale all men were out of themselves with joy, and rushed down into the boats in order from them to attack and kill the valuable animal. The fishery was carried on with such success, that, as has already been stated, the right whale (_Balaena mysticetus_ L.), whose pursuit then gave full employment to ships by hundreds, and to men by tens of thousands, is now practically extirpated. Thus during our many voyages in these waters we have only seen one such whale, which happened on the 23rd June, 1864, among the drift-ice off the west coast of Spitzbergen in 78 deg. N.L. As the right whale still occurs in no limited numbers in other parts of the Polar Sea, and as there has been no whale fishing on the coast of Spitzbergen for the last forty or fifty years, this state of things shows how difficult it is to get an animal type to return to a region where it has once been extirpated, or from which it has been driven away. The whale which Captain Svend Foeyn has almost exclusively hunted on the coast of Finmark since 1864 belongs to quite another species, _blaohvalen_ (_Balaenoptera Sibbaldii_ Gray); and there are likewise other species of the whale which still in pretty large numbers follow shoals of fish to the Norwegian coast, where they sometimes strand and are killed in considerable numbers. A _tandhval_, killer or sword-fish (_Orca gladiator_ Desm.) was even captured some years ago in the harbour of Tromsoe. This whale was already dying of suffocation, caused by an attempt to swallow an eider which entered the gullet, not, as the proper way is, with the head, but with the tail foremost. When the mouthful should have slidden down, it was prevented by the stiff feathers sticking out, and the bird stuck in the whale's throat, which, to judge by the extraordinary struggles it immediately began to make, must have caused it great inconvenience, which was increased still more when the inhabitants did not neglect to take advantage of its helpless condition to harpoon it. [Footnote 60: The name _stormfogel_ is also used for the Stormy Petrel (_Thalassidroma pelagica_, Vig.). This bird does not occur in the portions of the Polar Sea with which we are now concerned. ]