THE SOUTHERN SEA LION 273 



In Loaysa's voyage and again in that of Alcazaba it is stated that the Hver is more 

 or less poisonous. "Most of us who ate it suffered from the head to the feet", and 

 "the Hvers of these seals is so poisonous that they give fevers and headache to every 

 one who eat them, and presently all the hair on their bodies falls off and some die". 

 It is difficult to explain these statements; I have eaten a great deal of sea-lion Hver and 

 experienced none of the effects mentioned. The liver of the polar bear is also said to 

 be poisonous. One inclines to think that the bad effect might be due to sudden surfeits 

 of a fresh delicacy after a long spell of preserved food. 



Among later voyagers (Pernety and Hawkesworth) the name "sea lion" appears to 

 have been applied indiscriminately to elephant seals and sea lions, although Pernety 

 does differentiate between them in his illustrations, strange as they are. 



NOMENCLATURE 



The southern sea lion was not known to Linnaeus at the time of the publication of 

 the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae, and until the time of Peron was always 

 confused with Steller's sea lion, of which an account had been written by the discoverer. 



J. A. Allen (1905) has pubhshed such a detailed account of the synonymy of this 

 species that it is not necessary to give more than an outline here. It may, however, be 

 mentioned that Schreber (1776), for example, describes Phoca jubata mainly from 

 Steller's account of "Leo marinus" but uses Pernety's figure. In 1816 Peron gave 

 the name Otaria to the eared seals and distinguished between Otaria jubata (Steller's 

 sea lion) and Otaria leonina (the southern sea lion); the latter specific name was, 

 however, preoccupied for the elephant seal. The next specific name h flavescens (Shaw, 

 1800), but the reference is to a specimen not clearly identifiable; finally de Blainville 

 in 1820 gave the name byronia to a skull brought home by Byron in 1766 and now in 

 the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (No. 974). This skull is said to have 

 come from Tinian in the Caroline Islands, far beyond the range of Otaria byronia, 

 but it is nevertheless the skull of an adult male of the species. Byron had of course 

 been in the Falklands and other places in the region inhabited by this sea lion, and 

 there can be no doubt that the locality given for the skull is simply the result of an error. 



Th. Gill (1866) separated the Steller's and the southern sea lion into different 

 genera, retaining the latter in Otaria as O. jubata, but creating the new genus Eutnetopias 

 for Steller's species, with the specific name of stelleri. As J. A. Allen has pointed out, 

 this must give way to jubata (Peron), leaving the southern sea lion as Otaria byronia 

 (de Blainville). 



A considerable number of ephemeral species were erected during the nineteenth 

 century, apparently whenever the skull of some stage not previously seen turned up, 

 so that Allen was able to list twenty-four Latin names for this species. The source of 

 error lay in the lack of information on the species, which resulted in the failure to 

 appreciate that even in the adult there is considerable individual variation, that the 

 species takes several years to become adult, and that there is a very marked difference 

 in size between the sexes. 



