MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 101 



difference by all the males. She now roams at will about the rookery, 

 whereas before she was not allowed to go to the relief of her young 

 when in distress and crying for her. By the middle of August the 

 young are all born, and the females are again pregnant. The old males 

 having occupied their stations constantly for four months, without food, 

 now resign their charge to the younger males, and go to some distance 

 from shore to feed. 



The fact of their remaining without food seems so contrary to nature, 

 that it seems to me proper to state some of the evidences of it. Having 

 been assured by the natives that such was the fact, I deemed it of suffi- 

 cient importance to test it by all the means available. Accordingly I 

 took special pains to examine daily a large extent of the rookery and 

 note carefully the results of my observations. The rocks on the rookery 

 are worn smooth and washed clean by the spring tides, and any discharge 

 of excrement could not fail to be detected. I found, in a few instances, 

 where newly arrived seals had made a single discharge of red-colored 

 excrement, but nothing was seen afterwards to show that such discharges 

 were continued, or any evidence that the animals had partaken of food. 

 They never left the rocks, except when compelled by the heat of the 

 sun to seek the water to cool themselves. They are then absent from 

 the land for but a short time. I also examined the stomachs of sever- 

 al hundred young ones, killed by the natives for eating, and always 

 without finding any traces of food in them. The same was true of the 

 few nursing females killed for dissection.* On their arrival in the 



* Steller states that, in the numerous specimens he dissected, he always found the 

 stomachs empty, and remarks that they take no food during the several weeks they 

 remain on land. Mr. Dall confirms the same statement in respect to the present species, 

 and Captains Cook, Weddel, and others, who have had opportunities of observing the 

 different southern species, affirm the same fact in respect to the latter. Lord Shuldham 

 long since stated that the walrus had the same habit, though its annual fast seems some- 

 what shorter than those of the eared seals. In the London Philosophical Transactions 

 for the year 1775 (p. 249), in briefly describing the droves of walruses that at that time 

 frequented the Magdalen and other islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, he says that 

 they crawl upon the land in great numbers, at convenient landing-places, " and some- 

 times remain for fourteen days together without food, when the weather is fair; but on 

 the approach of rain they immediately retreat to the water with great precipitation." 



This singular phenomenon of a protracted annual fast during the period of parturition 

 and the nursing of the young — the season when most mammals require the most ample 

 sustenance — seems not wholly confined to the walruses and the eared seals. So far as 

 known, however, it is limited to the Pinnipedes; and, excepting in the case of a single 



