Head very large, and body short. Dorsal fin none. Belly smooth. Baleen elongate, slender. Vertebræ of the neck anchylosed. Pectoral fin broad, truncated at the end; fingers 5. Tympanic bones rhombic; maxillary bones narrow.
Capt. Maury’s Whale-Charts show that Right Whales are found in almost all seas, from the poles to within 35 or 30 degrees of latitude on each side of the equator. An experienced whaler observes that “Right Whales are as seldom seen in that belt as Sperm-Whales are found out of it.” Capt. Maury justly observes, the torrid zone is to these animals “forbidden ground, and it is as physically impossible for them to cross the equator as it would be to cross a sea of flame. In short, these researches show that there is a belt of from two to three thousand miles in breadth, and reaching from one side of the ocean to the other, in which the Right Whale is never found.”—Maury, Whale-Charts, p. 233.
Prof. Van Beneden, in a paper to the Royal Belgian Academy, and reproduced enlarged in the ‘Ostéographie—Cétacés,’ gives a geographical distribution of Whales. He acknowledges only six species, having the following distribution:—
1. B. mysticetus. The Arctic Ocean on both sides of Greenland, and on the coast of Siberia to the Sea of Okhotsk.
2. B. biscayensis. The North Atlantic, from latitude 65° to 45°, and a belt across the Atlantic to the coast of the United States, from lat. 45° to 50°.
3. B. japonica. A band across the North Pacific from lat. 60° to 45° on the west coast of America and 45° to 30° on the coast of Japan.
4. B. australis. A belt across the South Atlantic, from lat. 25° to 30° on the south-west coast of Africa and lat. 35° to 50° on the coast of South America.
5. B. antipodarum. In a similar belt across the South Pacific from the west coast of South America, in lat. 45°, to New Zealand.
6. A species which he does not name, said to inhabit a belt from Natal to the south-east part of Australia, about lat. 30°.
See Dr. Gray’s observations on this theory, Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 1868, vol. i. p. 242, and 1870, vol. vi. p. 193, in which he observes “I think I have proved that M. van Beneden’s theory is entirely unsupported by facts.”