ing storms or high tides into estuaries, or upon low shores, where,
upon the retiring of high water, they are stranded. Thus a narwal
(_Monodon monoceros_) was found on the beach, near Boston in
Lincolnshire, in the year 1800, the whole of its body buried in the mud.
A fisherman going to his boat saw the horn, and tried to pull it out,
when the animal began to stir itself.[1107] An individual of the common
whale (_Balaena mysticetus_), which measured seventy feet,
came ashore near Peterhead, in 1682. Many individuals of the genus
Balaenoptera have met the same fate. It will be sufficient to refer to
those cast on shore near Burnt Island, and at Alloa, recorded by Sibbald
and Neill. The other individual mentioned by Sibbald, as having come
ashore at Boyne, in Banffshire, was probably a razor-back. Of the genus
Catodon (_Cachalot_), Ray mentions a large one stranded on the west
coast of Holland in 1598, and the fact is also commemorated in a Dutch
engraving of the time of much merit. Sibbald, too, records that a herd
of Cachalots, upwards of 100 in number, were found stranded at
Cairston, in Orkney. The dead bodies of the larger Cetacea are sometimes
found floating on the surface of the waters, as was the case with the
immense whale exhibited in London in 1831. And the carcase of a sea-cow
or Lamantine (_Halicora_) was, in 1785, cast ashore near Leith.

To some accident of this kind we may refer the position of the skeleton
of a whale, seventy-three feet long, which was found at Airthrey, on the
Forth, near Stirling, imbedded in clay twenty feet higher than the
surface of the highest tide of the river Forth at the present day. From
the situation of the Roman station and causeways at a small distance
from the spot, it is concluded that the whale must have been stranded
there at a period prior to the Christian era.[1108]

Other fossil remains of this class have also been found in estuaries
known to have been silted up in recent times, one example of which has
been already mentioned near Lewes, in Sussex.

[Illustration: Fig. 106.

Fossil eggs of turtles from the Island of Ascension.[1109]]

_Marine reptiles._--Some singular fossils have lately been discovered in
the Island of Ascension, in a stone said to be continually forming on
the beach, where the waves threw up small rounded fragments of shells
and corals, which, in the course of time, become firmly agglutinated
together, and constitute a stone used largely for bui