ESTIMATES OF MR. ELLIOTT. 79 



That they were so was held as a tradition from Elliott's time down to 1896. It was, 

 however, a great mistake to assume, as has been done, that at that time all the seals 

 were present. Counts of live pups l made in the seasons of 1896 and 1897 show that at 

 the height of the season not over half of the cows are actually present at any one time. 

 The apparent stability of the rookeries is due to the fact that then the arrivals and 

 departures among the cows for a time practically b'alauce each other at their maximum 

 point. But daily counts of the rookeries show that the stability is in no sense real, 

 there being from day to day even then a variation of from 10 to 30 per cent in the 

 rookery population. 2 



RESULTS OF MR. ELLIOTT'S ENUMERATION. 



But of these things Mr. Elliott was not aware. He was content to assume that 

 all the cows were there and, moreover, though he could not locate the virgin 2-year- 

 olds, a class of animals numbering, in his estimate, 225,000, which were not present 

 until long after it was made, he did not hesitate to assume that they were included. 

 He was also content with his impossible law of distribution. It only remained for him, 

 therefore, to find the area of breeding ground occupied and to divide it by the unit of 

 space to be assigned to each individual animal, to arrive at the rookery population. 

 As a result be found, in his estimate of 6,386,840 square feet of rookery ground on the 

 two islands, "room," as he puts it, "for 3,193,420 breeding seals and young." 3 



THE FIGURES UNREASONABLE. 



Waiving, for a moment, the method of obtaining these figures, we may remark 

 that they are not easy to understand. Of this total of " breeding seals and young," 

 Mr. Elliott, in the same connection, tells us that 1,000,000 are "young." There must 

 then be an equal number of mothers, or 2,000,000 adult breeding females and their 

 pups. To this must be added the young 2-year-old cows which are included, though 

 not present. Mr. Elliott has himself given us an estimate of these. Considering 

 that of the 1,000,000 pups born 500,000 are females, he says that "at least 225,000 of 

 them safely return in the second season after birth." This, therefore, gives us a total 

 of 2,225,000 females and young in the complete estimate of 3,193,420, leaving 868,420 

 animals which can only be accounted for as breeding bulls. This is impossible, and 

 yet no other explanation of the discrepancy is at hand. Mr. Elliott estimates, in a 

 separate category, all the nonbreeding males and the yearling females, finding 

 1,500,000 of them. Of the breeding bulls, as a class, Mr. Elliott does not give us a 

 separate estimate in 1872. but in 1890 he tells us they numbered 90,000 at that time. 



THE METHOD OF ENUMERATION FAULTY. 



But if these figures were in themselves reasonable, we must still take exception to 

 the method by which they were obtained. We have already spoken of the general 

 difficulties in the way of acreage measurements. On his method of surveying the 

 rookeries Mr. Elliott has given us practically no data. He dismisses the subject 

 with the remark "that there is no more difficulty in surveying these margins than 

 there is in drawing sight along the curbs of a stone fence surrounding a field," a 

 statement which is not by any means self-evident to anyone who has visited the 



1 See page 109. * See page 54. :i Elliott, Monograph of Fur-Seal Islands, 1881, p. 61. 



