Page:VCH Lancaster 1.djvu/258

 MAMMALS The generally recognized British mammal fauna of the present day com- prises seventy-three species, of which, excluding the domesticated mammals, Lancashire has forty-seven representatives. The most notable absentees occur among the Cheiroptera and the Cetacea, and of the sixteen species of the former admitted into the British list, seven have so far been recorded for the county. Among the unregistered species, however, the hairy-armed bat [Pterygistes leisleri) and the whiskered bat [Myotis mystacinus), whose range has been recorded as extending to the ' Lake District,' without specifically mentioning any locality in Lancashire, will almost certainly be yet discovered within our limits when the bats have been more numerously collected and more carefully identified in the northern part of the shire. Of the remain- ing species of bats three are doubtfully British, and four are confined to the south of England. Of the unrecorded cetaceans four are unknown to have visited the western coasts of Britain ; one, Risso's grampus {Grampus grlseus), is a very rare visitor to our seas ; and the other two, the black-fish [Globi- cephalus melas) and the lesser rorqual [Balanoptera acuto-rostrata), will in all probability, from their known wide range, be yet recorded as Lancashire visitants. Indeed, among the remains of various animals found in the excava- tions on the margin of the Ribble for the Preston Docks, no fewer than three skulls of the black-fish were discovered, besides the jaw-bone of a right whale [Balcena mysticetus) and the skulls of a porpoise and of a species of grampus. The most remarkable cetacean on our list is the great hump-backed whale, which, venturing into the Mersey in 1863, became stranded so far from the sea as the mud flats near to Speke Hall. The only other group in which Lancashire falls short of the full tale of English species is the Carnivora, in which no representative of the ringed seal (Phoca hispidd) has yet been met with ; nor, indeed, has the species been recorded from the shores of any western county of England. The enormous and increasing sandbanks fringing the whole coast line from Cumberland to the mouth of the Dee are loaded with rich moUuscan and ophiuroid deposits, and the waters overflowing them teem with polyzoa, crustaceans, and fish-fry. These sandbanks are just the localities towards which cetaceans and marine carnivores would be attracted ; and doubtless these unsupervised areas are visited by species of both groups, during their migrations, far oftener than can be observed from the shore. The ceaseless extension of the boundaries of our towns and cities • the increase of chemical and other industries which invade with their fatal fumes ever broadening tracts of country ; the continous reduction by drainage of the mosses and meres which in Lancashire were once (and even yet are) so 206