WEDDELL'S SEAL. 17 



westward across McMurdo Sound. The distance in yards is given between the 



holes : — 



Hole No. 1 ... ... For egress and ingress. 



400 yards to No. 2 ... ... Blow-hole only. 



140 yards to No. 3 ... ... Blow-bole only. 



200 yards to No. 4 ... ... For egress and ingress, 1 J seal out. 



140 yards to No. 5 ... ... For egress and ingress, many signs of occupation. 



GO yards to No. 6 ... ... Blow-hole only. 



150 yards to No. 7 ... ... Blow-hole only. 



180 yards to No. 8 ... ... For egress and ingress, 1 J seal out. 



Tlie depth of water beneath these holes was about 300 fathoms. By such signs as the 

 above, and without actually seeing by any means so large a number of seals as in the 

 summer, we gradually convinced ourselves that there were, nevertheless, a large number 

 upon the spot. Nor were those that we saw or caught of any one age or sex. Some 

 were males and just as many were females ; some were yearlings, but many more, as 

 one would expect, were adults. -All were very fat, and their coats in excellent 

 condition ; perhaps the fattest of all, at any period of the year, were the adult females 

 that we met with in the .spring. The huge animals used to collect in various secluded 

 spots, often many miles from open water, as for example at Pram Point to the south 

 of Cape Armitage, where from twenty to twenty-five miles of solid ice separated them 

 from the nearest open sea. There they lay, entering the water from time to time by 

 boles or cracks amongst the pressure ridges, throughout September and October, 

 waiting for the birth of their young. These began to appear first on October 22ud in 

 1902, and on October 25th in 1903, at the Pram Point rookery, which was not only 

 the largest but the nearest of all that we met with in McMurdo Sound. If we 

 wandered northwards, along the west coast of Ross Island, we could find here and 

 there, along the tide crack, a group of breeding Weddells. Further still, if we came 

 to Tortoise Rock we found again mothers and young amongst all the pressure ridges 

 around that island, and by the tongue of a glacier, or away amongst the Delbridge 

 Islands, again large numbers of old and young, but nowhere were they so plentiful or 

 so convenient for observation as amongst the ridoes of broken ice about Pram Point. 

 This nursery was visited every day or two as the state of the weather allowed ; and 

 here, on returning from a sledge journey in 1903, 1 found that Hodgson had generously 

 " ear-marked " every infant as it was born l)y attaching a tin label with a number to 

 its hinder flipper, much against the infant's will and often enough with scanty approval 

 from its parent. By means of these labels we were to some extent able to watch 

 the changes in the coat of the infants during the first month of their existence (see 

 figs. 12 and 13, p. 16 ; also figs. 14 and 15, p. 18). 



At birth the young Weddell's Seal is clothed in a woolly coat of long hair, of a 

 rusty greyish colour, presenting but the faintest indication of any marking (see 

 figs. 16 and 17, p. 20). This woolly coat consists of two varieties of hair, the one 

 2-8 cm. long, fine, and almost straight; the other shorter, fine, and very curly, so 



