Browne to Dugdale on certain fossil bones.
["Eastern Counties Collectanea," pp. 193-195].
The letter referred to in the foot-note on page 33, written by Sir Thomas Browne to Dugdale, and formerly in the possession of the late Mr. Arthur Preston of Norwich, whose collection of manuscripts was dispersed by auction in August, 1888, was printed in a brief-lived and little-known local publication, entitled the "Eastern Counties Collectanea" (1872-3), at page 193. In this letter occurs a passage which confirms the doubt expressed as to the Whales which had young ones after coming on shore at Hunstanton being Sperm Whales. They are expressly said to have been of that sort "which seamen call a Grampus," and as Sir Nicholas le Strange, in a MS. preserved in the Muniment room at Hunstanton, applies the name "Grampus" to an undoubted specimen of Hyperoodon rostratus (as shown both by his description and outline sketch) which came ashore there in the year 1700, I have little doubt that the Cetaceans in question belonged to that species and not to Physeter macrocephalus.
This letter is interesting also as filling a gap in Wilkin's series and I therefore reproduce it, omitting only occasional learned digressions which do not affect the subject. The original not being available, I have used the copy in the "Collectanea" before mentioned.
Dugdale, in November, 1658, and again later, had written to Browne, sending him a bone of a "fish which was taken up by Sir Robert Cotton, in digging a pond at the skirt of Conington downe," and asking his opinion thereof. (Wilkin, i., pp. 385 and 390.)
To the first of these letters Browne replied, under date of the 6th December, 1658, "I receaued the bone of the fish, and shall giue you some account of it when I have compared it with another bone which is not by mee" (op. cit. p. 387). The letter which follows and which was unknown to Wilkin supplies this information.
[p. 193.] "Sr I cannot sufficiently admire the ingenious industry of Sr Robert Cotton in preserving so many things of rarity and observation nor commend your own enquiries for the satisfaction of such particulars. The petrified bone you sent me, which with divers others was found underground, near Cunnington, seems to be the vertebra, spondyle or rackbone of some large fish, and no terrestrious animal as some upon sight conceived, as either of Camel, rhinoceros, or elephant, for it is not perforated and hollow but solid according to the spine of fishes in whom the spinal marrow runs in a channel above these solid racks, or spondiles.
"It seems much too big for the largest Dolphins, porpoises, or sword fishes, and too little for a true or grown whale, but may be the bone of some big cetaceous animal, as particularly of that which seamen call a Grampus; a kind of small whale, whereof some come short, some exceed twenty foot. And not only whales but Grampusses have been taken in this Estuarie or mouth of the fenland rivers. And about twenty years ago four were run ashore near Hunstanton and two had young ones after they came to land. But whether this fish were of the longitude of twenty foot (as is conceived) some doubt may be made for this bone containeth little more than an inch in thickness, and not three inches in breadth so that it might have a greater number thereof than is easily allowable to make out that longitude. For of the whale which was cast upon our coast about six years ago a vertebra or rackbone still preserved, containeth a foot in breadth and nine inches in depth, yet the whale with all advantages but sixty-two foot in length. [p, 194.] We are not ready to believe that, wherever such relics of fish or sea animals are found, the sea hath had its course. And Goropius Becanus[131] long ago could not digest that conceit when he found great numbers of shells upon the highest Alps. For many may be brought unto places where they were not first found.
[131] This seems to refer to the "De Gigantibus eorumque reliquiis" of J. van Gorp, Jean Bécan, or Joannes Goropius (as the name is variously given in the "Biographie Universelle" (b. 1518, d. 1572), and apparently published after the Author's death by Jean Chassanion, 8vo, Basileæ, 1580, and another edition in 1587. See Brit. Mus. Cat.; but I have not seen the book.
"Some bones of our whale were left in several fields which when the earth hath obscured them, may deceive some hereafter, that the sea hath come so high. In northern nations where men live in houses of fishbones and in the land of the Icthiophagi near the Red sea where mortars were made of the backbones of whales, doors of their jaws, and arches of their ribs, when time hath covered them they might confound after discoverers.…