EXTERNAL CHARACTERS. 35 



the cauiue teeth of a lion ; the third year they are about six inches 

 long. 



" Tusks vary very much in size and shape according- to the age 

 and sex of the animal. A good pair of bull's tusks may be stated 

 as twenty-four inches long,* and four pounds apiece in weight j 

 but we obtained several pairs above these dimensions, and in 

 particular one pair, which measured thirty-one inches in length 

 when taken out of the head, and weighed eight pounds each. 

 Such a pair of tusks, however, is extremely rare, and I never, 

 to the best of my belief, saw a pair nearly equal to them among 

 more than one thousand Walruses, although we took the utmost 

 pains to secure the best, and always inspected the tusks care- 

 fully with a glass before we fired a shot or threw a harpoon. 



" Cows' tusks will average fully as long as bulls', from being less 

 liable to be broken, but they are seldom more than twenty inches 

 long and three pounds each in weight. They are generally set 

 much closer together than the bull's tusks, sometimes overlap- 

 ping one another at the points, as in the case with the stuffed 

 specimen at the British Museum. The tusks of old bulls, on the 

 contrary, generally diverge from one another, being sometimes 

 as much as fifteen inches apart at the points." t 



Mr. Brown observes : " The whalers declare that the female 

 Walrus is without tusks ; I have certainly seen females without 

 them, but, again, others with both well developed. In this re- 

 spect it may be similar to the female Narwhal, which has occa- 

 sionly no ' horn ' developed." $ 



Captain Parry states that Captain Lyon obtained the head of 

 a small Walrus, remarkable on account of its having three tusks, 

 all very short, but two of them close together on the right side 

 of the jaw, and placed one behind the other. 



Scoresby gives the length of the tusks externally as from " ten 

 to fifteen inches," and their full length when cut from the skull 

 as from " fifteen to twenty, sometimes almost thirty," and their 

 weight as from " five to ten pounds each, or upward." || 



The sexual differences described by Lamont were long since 



* This probably includes their whole length when removed from the sock- 

 ets, of which probably not more than eighteen to twenty inches were ex- 

 posed in life. 



tLoc. cit., pp. 137-140. 



JProc. Zool. Soc. Loud., 1868, p. 429. 



Narrative of Parry's Second Voyage, p. 415. 



|| Account of the Arctic Regions, vol. i, p. 502. 



