No officers, apart from those who actually served in the Franklin expedition, were so closely connected with it, both before and after its departure, as Sir Edward Parry and Sir James Clark Ross. Parry, after his last Arctic expedition (1827), was consulted as a matter of course by the Admiralty on all Arctic problems; he assisted in organising the Franklin Expedition; and was one of the Admiralty's principal advisers during the search.

To many people looking for the first time at maps of the polar regions it seems astonishing how lacking in originality many of the names appear to be. Yet, before they become too trenchant in their criticism they should themselves try the experiment of finding names for the natural features which they see round them. It is not as easy as it sounds, and however firmly one lays down rules for place-names they will be broken over and over again with good reasons.

The purpose of this article is to give a general indication of the present state of our knowledge of whales, regarded as an element of the oceanic fauna, and to indicate some of the more important problems which still await solution. The term “whales” is used here to include only the largest of the Cetacea, which are the Right whales, the Rorquals and the Sperm whale; and the subject has to do with these whales in the collective sense, that is to say their habits as a community, and their breeding, growth and distribution, especially in the southern hemisphere, rather than with such matters as comparative anatomy and physiology.