154 The Scottish Naturalist. 



ON THE GREY SEAL, HALICHCERUS GEYPUS, ON THE EAST 



COAST OP SCOTLAND. 



BY ROBERT WALKER, F.G.S.E. 



THE history of the Grey Seal in the British Seas was for a 

 long time enveloped in considerable obscurity. This 

 was to a certain extent, no doubt, owing to the limited number 

 of people who took sufficient interest in biological matters to 

 induce them to investigate any subject for themselves. In the 

 case of the seals, the few opportunities that occurred to those 

 that were interested in them of examining living or recently 

 killed specimens, allowed the indentification of nearly all our 

 seals to remain long in confusion and uncertainty. There has 

 also to be taken into account the difficulty presented in the 

 close resemblance that almost all the northern seals have to 

 each other in external shape, and to a great extent in colour, 

 more especially in young and half-grown individuals. This 

 is, unfortunately for the purpose of identification, the condition 

 not only in which they are most frequently obtained, but that 

 in which they present a somewhat different aspect, both in col- 

 ouring and form of the head, from that exhibited by the mature 

 members of the same species. All this, and the anatomical 

 characters whereby they can with certainty be distinguished 

 from each other, not having been formerly well known, led, as 

 a matter of course, to the seal in question receiving several 

 specific names. 



In 1742, Dr. Parsons 1 shortly described and figured a young 

 specimen of a large seal that was exhibited alive for some time 

 at Charing Cross, as the sea calf. He does not state at this 

 time where his seal was caught, but in a subsequent paper in 

 the same publication in 1750, he gives the coast of Cornwall 

 and the Isle of Wight as the localities frequented by what he 

 then calls the long bodied seal, a name by which it was after- 

 wards known. Buffon 2 in his " Le grand Phoque " identified 

 Parsons' seal with the Urksuk of Crautz. 3 The latter animal 

 was, not long after, identified by Fabricius 4 with his Phoca 

 barbata. Pennant 5 follows Buffon, and states that the sea calf 

 or great seal was not uncommon on the coast of Scotland, par- 

 ticularly about the rock Hiskyr, one of the western isles, where it 



I Philosophical Transactions. 2 Hist. Nat. Supp. 



3 Hist. Greenland. 4 Fauna Grcenlandica. 5 Brit. Zoology. 



