224 ORAL ARGUMENT OF SIR CHARLES RUSSELL, Q. C. M. P. 



Washington, Department of the Interior, 10th census of the United 

 States, Walker, superintendent, and so on. The paragraph to which I 

 am referring is on page 31. 



The first arrivals are not always the oldest hulls. 

 I will read this shortly. 



Their method of landing is to come collectively to those breeding grounds, where 

 they passed the prior season ; but I am not able to say authoritatively, nor do 1 believe 

 it, strongly as it has been urged by many careful men. . .that these animals come 

 back to and take up the same position on their breeding grounds that they individ- 

 ually occupied when there last year. From my knowledge of their action and 

 habit I shoukl say very few, if any of them make such a selection and keep these 

 places year after year. — 



988 and so on. And he comes to the conclusion that they do not 

 come to the same spot. 

 He proci eds : 



It is entertaining to note in this connection, that the Eussians themselves, with 

 the obiect of testing this mooted query, duriusr the later years of their possession of 

 tlie Islands, drove up a number of young males from Lukaunon, cut off their ears, 

 and turned them out to sea again. The following season, when the droves came in 

 from the hauling grounds to the slaughtering fields, quite a number of those 

 cropped seals were in the drives, but instead of being found all at one place, the 

 place from whence they were driven the year before, they were scattered examples 

 of croppies from every point on the island. The same experiment was again made 

 by our people in 1870 (tlie natives having told them of this prior undertaking) and 

 they went also to Lukaunon, drove up 100 young males, cut ofi" their left ears, and 

 set them free in turn. Of this number durijjg the summer of 1872 when I was there, 

 the natives found in their. driving of 75,000 seals from the different hauling grounds 

 of St. Paul up to the village killing grounds, two on Novatoslinah rookery, 10 miles 

 north of Lukaunon, and two or tliree from English bay and Tolstoi rookeries, 6 

 miles west by water; one or two were taken on St. George Island, 36 miles to the 

 south-east, and not one from Lukaunon was found among those that were driven 

 from there; pvobablj^, had all the young males on the two islands this season been 

 examined, the rest of the croppies that had returned from the pi rils of the deep, 

 whence they sojourned during the winter, would have been distributed quite equally 

 about the Pribilof hauling grounds. Although the natives say that they think the 

 cutting off of the animal's ear gives the water such access to its head as to cause its 

 death, yet I noticed that those examples which we had recognized by this auricular 

 mutilation were normally fat and well developed. Their theory does not appeal to 

 my belief, and it certainly requires confirmation. 



Therefore, that experiment shews that this suggestion of attachment 

 to a particular spot or even to a particular rookery, is not well-founded; 

 that it does not exist even with regard to a particular Island, but that 

 of those that were so marked on one Island some were found on another 

 Island 36 miles away, and some were not found at all. What became 

 of the rest! Who can tell? Their natural enemies, no doubt, could 

 account for some of them; some may have intermingled with the 

 Russian herd, and others gone elsewhere. Who can tell? No one. 

 And all this difticulty and uncertainty of identification, the Tribunal 

 cannot fail to see, has a most imi)ortant bearing on the question of the 

 claim to legal property in the individual seals. Let me illustrate what 

 I mean; supposing, instead of both these Islands being in the posses- 

 sion of the United States, that the dividing line of territory, had been 

 drawn between these Islands, and one was left in the possession of 

 Russia and the other of the United States: would such a claim to 

 proi)erty be possible then? Or, again, to take another case which 

 throws a stronger light on this question of property. Supposing that 

 instead of the United States being not merely the sovereign owners of 

 the land, but also the owners of the dominium utile, — suppose, as is 

 the case with the Scilly Islands on the south-west coast of England, 



