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struction of female life; and in the second place, because of its waste- 

 fulness through the frequent failure to recover seals shot at sea. 



* * * The fur seal of Alaska (practically now the only remaining 

 member of the group of fur seals) should be declared to be, to all 

 intents and purposes, a domestic animal, and its capture absolutely 

 prohibited except in its home on the I'ribilof Islands." Nineteenth 

 Century^ June, 1893, p. 1038. 



Sir George Baden-Powell, one of the British Commissioners, pub- 

 licly declared before his appointment as a commissiouer, that "as a 

 matter of fact, the Canadian sealers take very few, if any, seals close to 

 these (the Pribilof) islauds. The main catch is made far out at sea, 

 and is almost cntirehj composed of females.'''' 



Dr. A. Milne Edwards, director of the Museum of ISTatural History at 

 Paris, alluding to the fur seals frequenting Bering Sea, says: 



"What has hax)pened in the Southern Ocean may serve as a warning 

 to us. Less than a century ago these amphibia [fur seals] existed there 

 in countless herds. In 1808, when Fanning visited the islands of 

 South Georgia, one ship left those shores carrying away 14,000 seal- 

 skins belonging to the species Arctoeephalus Australis. He himselt 

 obtained 57,000 of them and he estimated at 112,000 the number of 

 these animals killed during the few weeks the sailors s]ient there that 

 year. In 1822 Weddel visited the islands and he estimated at 1,200,000 

 the number of skins obtained in that locality. The same year 320,000 

 fur seals were killed in the South Shetlands. The inevitable conse- 

 quences of this slaughter were a rapid decrease in the number of these 

 animals. So, in spite of the measures of protection taken during the 

 last few years by the governor of the Falkland Islands, the seals are 

 still very rare, and the naturalists of the French expedition of the 

 Romanche remained for nearly a year at Terra del Fuego and the 

 Falkland Islands without being able to catch a single specimen. It is 

 a source of wealth which is now exhausted. It will be thus with the 

 Gallorhinus ursinus in the Xorth Pacific Ocean, and it is time to insure 

 to these animals a security which may allow them regular reproduction. 

 I have followed with much attention the investigations which have 

 been made by the Government of the United States on this subject. 

 The reports of the Commissioners sent to the Pribilof Islands have 

 made known to naturalists a very large number of facts of great 

 scientific interest, and have demonstrated that a regulated system of 

 killing may be safely ajjplied in the case of these herds of seals when 



