Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/53

Rh an Ortolan; Wheatears plentifully. At the Store-Lerfos, near Trondhjem, the Scandinavian Black-bellied Dipper (Cinclus melanogaster).

A sharp look-out on board our steamer was kept for cetaceans. At the whaling station on the Jarfjord two Whales were on the slips, and had been partly flensed and cut up. One was the Common Rorqual (Balænoptera musculus); the other, so far as I could make out from its long flippers, a Humpback (Megaptera longimana). These flippers are wholly white in living or recently captured specimens. On leaving the Jarfjord we were fortunate in seeing a Common Rorqual brought in towed alongside one of the steam whalers. This was about sixty feet in length, and some good photographs were taken of the animal alongside, our own steamer and the whaler stopping for that purpose. In the fjord near Christianssund N. were two species of Dolphin; one of these was dark coloured above and below, and probably referable to D. tursio; the other a beautiful black and white one. Two of these latter raced along the side of the ship; they reminded me of a pair of greyhounds in full stretch, now one and now the other making a sudden rush ahead, or diverging from its course to seize some surface-swimming fish (probably mackerel) disturbed by the passage of the steamer. These Dolphins were close to the surface in absolutely clear water; from their markings I have no doubt they were D. acutus and not albirostris.

On the return voyage to Newcastle, when about fifty miles from the Tyne, we passed through a fleet of Dutch boats, fishing with their masts down. A very large Whale was rolling slowly along, and showing little but his back. Species not determined. One feature of these northern seas is the enormous abundance of marine invertebrata—Scyphomedusæ. They may be seen suspended at all depths in the marvellous transparency of the water. The commonest form has four circular purple rings, like a double eye-glass, at the summit of the disc; others are like parasols—scalped heads, from the colour, somebody called them—with sheaves of long semitransparent tentacles streaming in their wake like the tail of a comet. Progression is a system of contraction and expansion. When the ship was stationary in the harbour, or from some wooden pier, we used to watch them, yawning and gaping their way along in a dilettante manner, much