194 BRITISH MAMMALS 



June, according to latitude. The period of gestation is about 

 a year, and the female walrus is said to breed only once in every 

 three years. The mammae are two in number ordinarily, and are 

 situated on the abdomen. 



An extinct form of walrus {Odobienus huxleyi) inhabited 

 Eastern England at the close of the Pliocene period, and the 

 True Walrus {Odob^nus rosmarus) was found in the same region 

 (Ely fens and off the coast of Suffolk) during the human epoch, 

 but it was also known on the coast of Scotland perhaps as late as 

 the fifteenth century. Much later than that, within the first half 

 of the nineteenth century, walruses have been killed on the coasts 

 of the Hebrides and of the Orkney Islands. It was reported that 

 one was seen off the coast of Orkney in 1857, and another about 

 the same time in the Shetland Archipelago. Two or three 

 centuries ago the walrus was still abundant off the coast of 

 Norway, and was very common round the coasts of Iceland, 

 while in the North Pacific between latitude 55° and the polar 

 ice it was extremely abundant down to about thirty years ago. 

 The walrus, however, is fast being exterminated by man. 

 Mr. Lydekker states that in ten years, between 1870 and 1880, 

 at least 100,000 walruses must have been killed by the Russian 

 whalers, who exported from the vicinity of Behring Straits 

 400,000 lb. of walrus ivory and 2,000,000 galls, of walrus oil 

 during that period. At the present day the walrus is found 

 round the northern coast of Greenland and the north-western 

 shores of Hudson's Bay and Baffin's Bay. At one time they 

 ranged southwards as far as Newfoundland, but have been 

 extinguished near all the habitable parts of British North America 

 since i 840. East of Greenland the walrus is met with occasion- 

 ally off the coasts of Iceland, Spitzbergen, Franz Josefs Land, 

 Novaia Zemlia, and eastwards along the north coast of Siberia as 

 far as the estuary of the Lena. The Pacific variety of the walrus 

 is still found along the north-east coast of Siberia, the chain of 

 islands across Behring Straits, and the northern and north-western 

 coasts of Alaska. Its days are numbered, because neither the 

 British Government, nor the Russian, nor the Danish, nor that 



