REPORT on the SEALS and WHALES (PINNIPEDIA 
and CETACEA) of the L.M.B.C. DISTRICT. 
By Tuomas J. Moors, Corr. Memb. Zool. Soc. Lond., 
CURATOR OF THE FREE PUBLIC MUSEUM, LIVERPOOL. 
[Read 10th May, 1889.] 
Part I. SEALS :— 
In the second edition of Bell’s ‘‘ British Quadrupeds’”’ 
(Van Voorst, 1874), six species of Seals, including the 
Walrus, are enumerated as having occurred on the coasts 
of Great Britain and Ireland. ‘T'wo of these, the Hooded 
Seal and the Grey Seal, have occurred in the Mersey, 
are preserved in the Liverpool Museum, and came under 
my own personal observation as recorded below. Other 
notices of Seals in our district are few, vague and unsatis- 
factory. Byerley, in his ‘“‘Fauna of Liverpool,” 1854, 
p- 7, mentions only one, Phoca vitulina, the Common Seal 
or Sea-Calf, as having occurred occasionally in the Dee 
and Mersey, and neighbouring parts of the coast. Dr. 
Cuthbert Collingwood, in his carefully compiled paper on 
“The Historical Fauna of Lancashire and Cheshire,” 
says:* ‘Seals have occasionally come up our rivers. Dr. 
Leigh mentions a Sea-Calf Seal as taken in the Ribble ; 
and Pennant (Zool., vol. i., p. 177) describes a Pied Seal 
(Phoca bicolor), of which he says, ‘this I saw at Chester ; 
it was taken near that city in May, 1766.’” To this 
Collingwood adds, ‘‘This appears to have been an indi- 
vidual of the species Monachus albiventer (Gray, Mus. 
Catal.), a rare Mediterranean species, of which this is 
the only specimen recorded as captured upon British 
* Proc. Lit. and Phil. Soc. L’pool, 1864. 
