A GEEAT SEAL. 325 



where it was not stiff and upright like the rays of a 

 fin, but 'washed about.' Guided by the above interpre- 

 tation, of the ' mane of a horse, or a bunch of sea-weed,' 

 the animal was not a cetaceous mammal, but rather a 

 great seal. But what seal of large size, or indeed of any 

 size, would be encountered in latitude 24?° 44' south, 

 and longitude 9° 22' east — viz., about three hundred miles 

 from the western shore of the southern end of Africa ? The 

 most likely species to be there met with are the largest of 

 the seal tribe, e.g, Anson's sea-lion, or that known to 

 the southern whalers by the name of the " sea-elephant," 

 the Phoca prohoscidea, which attains the length of from 

 twenty to thirty feet. These great seals abound in certain 

 of the islands of the southern and antarctic seas, from 

 which an individual is occasionally floated off upon an 

 iceberg. The sea-lion exhibited in London last spring, 

 which was a young individual of the Phoca prohoscidea, 

 was actually captured in that predicament ; having been 

 carried by the currents that set northward towards the 

 Cape, where its temporary resting-place was rapidly 

 melting away. When a large individual of the Phoca 

 prohoscidea or Phoca leonina is thus borne off to a dis- 

 tance from its native shore, it is compelled to return for 

 rest to its floating abode, after it has made its daily ex- 

 cursions in quest of the fishes or squids that constitute its 

 food. It is thus brought by the iceberg into the latitudes 

 of the Cape, and perhaps further north, before the berg 

 has melted away. Then the poor seal is compelled to 

 swim as long as strength endures ; and in such a predica,- 



,„^^f--Am*i*-ar 



