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4. Additional Notes on the Occurrence of the Sperm-Whale in the Scottish Seas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2014

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Extract

In a communication made to this Society on the 6th February, 1871, I noted the capture of a sperm-whale at Oban in May, 1829, and I collected from various sources records of the stranding of seven additional specimens on the Scottish coasts.

Since that communication was published, a large sperm-whale has come ashore on the west coast of the Isle of Skye, some particulars concerning which I propose to relate in this communication.

Tourists in Skye, during the past autumn, who visited Loch Corruisk by boat from Torrin, as they sailed up Loch Scavaig, became conscious, by another sense than that of sight, that a large animal in a state of putrefaction was in their immediate vicinity.

Type
Proceedings 1871-72
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1872

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References

page 633 note * Trans. Zool. Soc. 1868.

page 638 note * Whaling Voyage, vol. ii. p. 155.

page 641 note * Mémoires de la Soc. Royale des Antiquaries du Nord, 1860–1860, Copenhague.

page 642 note * Gronlandia Antiqua, pp. 90, 96. Havniæ, 1706.

page 642 note † Hafniæ, 1780, p. 36, et seq.

page 642 note ‡ Zoologicæ Danicæ prodromus. Hafniæ, 1776.

page 642 note § Forsog til en Islandsk Naturhistorie. Copenhagen, 1786.

page 642 note ║ Oldnordisk Ordbog. Copenhagen, 1863.

page 643 note * See my Memoir in Trans, of this Society, p. 247, 1870.

page 644 note * In connection with this animal, I may refer to an essay in the “Scottish Naturalist,” dated November 1871, by Mr Robert Walker, of St Andrews, in which he describes and figures the vertebra of a whale, in the University Library of that city, which he believes to be the tenth dorsal of a youngish Cachalot. He believes it to be a relic of a whale stranded there, from which Mr Foster, a former Regent in the University of St Andrews, obtained a parasite which he sent to Sibbald, who figured it. He thinks that the whale figured on the same plate, though stated to be stranded at Monifieth, may have been this animal.