THE HABITS OF THE FUR SEAL. 75 



C. THE HABITS OF THE FUR SEAL. 



By HENRY W. ELLIOTT. 

 30. LIFE-HISTORY OF THE FUR SEAL. 



DESCRIPTION OF AN ADULT MALE. The Fur Seal, which repairs every year to the Pribylov 

 Islands to breed and to shed its hair and fur, in numbers that seem almost fabulous, is the highest 

 organized of all the Pinnipedia, and, indeed, for that matter, when land and water are weighed in 

 the account together, there is no other animal known to man which can be truly, as it is, classed 

 superior, from a purely physical point of view. Certainly there are few, if any, creatures in 

 the animal kingdom that can be said to exhibit a higher order of instinct, approaching even our 

 intelligence. 



I wish to draw attention to a specimen of the finest of this race a male in the flush and prime 

 of his first maturity, six or seven years old, and full grown. When it comes up from the sea early 

 in the spring, out to its station for the breeding season, we have an .animal before us that will 

 measure six and a half to seven and a quarter feet in length from tip of nose to the end of its 

 abbreviated, abortive tail. It will weigh at least 400 pounds, and I have seen older specimens 

 much more corpulent, which, in my best judgment, could not be less than GOO pounds in weight. 

 The head of this animal now before us, appears to be disproportionately small in comparison with 

 the immense thick neck and shoulders; but as we come to examine it we will find it is mostly all 

 occupied by the brain. The light frame-work of the skull supports an expressive pair of large 

 bluish hazel eyes; alternately burning with revengeful, passionate light, then suddenly changing 

 to the tones of tenderness and good nature. It has a muzzle and jaws of about the same size and 

 form observed in any full blooded Newfoundland dog, with this difference, that the lips are not 

 flabby and overhanging; they are as firmly lined and pressed against one another as our own. The 

 upper lips support a yellowish white and gray moustache, composed of long, stiff bristles, and when 

 it is not torn out and broken off in combat, it sweeps down and over the shoulders 'as a luxuriant 

 Illume. Look at it as it comes leisurely swimming on toward the land; see how high above the 

 water it,. carries its head, an 1 how deliberately it surveys the beach, after having stepped upon it 

 (for it may be truly said to step with its fore-flippers, as they regularly alternate when it moves 

 up), carrying the, head well above them, erect and graceful, at least three feet from the ground. 

 The lore-feet, or flippers, are a pair of dark bluish-black hands, about eight or ten inches broad at 

 their junction with the body, and the metacarpal joint, running out to an ovate point at their 

 extremity, some fifteen 1o eighteen 'inches from this union; all the rest of the forearm, the ulna, 

 radius, and humerus. being eoneealed under the skin and thick blubber-folds of the main body and 

 neck, hidden entirely at this season, wheuit is so fat. Bnt six \ucks to three months after this 

 time of landing, when that siiperlluons fat and flesh has been consumed by self-absorption, thosii 

 bones show plainly under the shimikcn skin. On tin; upper side of these flippers the hair of the 

 body straggles down finer and fainter as it comes below to a point close by, and slightly beyond 

 that spot of junction where the phalanges and the metacarpal bones unite, similar lo that point on 

 our own hand where our knuckles are placed; and here the hair ends, leaving the rest of ihe skin 

 to the end of the flipper bare and wrinkled in places at the margin of the inner side; showing, also, 

 fine small pits, containing abortive nails, which are situated immediately over the union of the 

 phalanges with their cartilaginous continuations to the end of the flipper. 



