III.] 



OLD ACCOUNTS OF THE WALRUS. 



123 



ceutury, " Konungs skuggsja" (the King's Minor), as an animal 

 resembling the seal/ except that, besides several smaller teeth, it 

 has two large tusks which project beyond the upper jaw. This 

 clear and unexaggerated sketch is however replaced in the later 

 writings of the middle ages by the most extraordinary accounts 

 of the animal's appearance and mode of capture. Thus Albertus 

 Magnus/' wlio died in 1280, says that the walrus is taken by the 



WALRUSES (female with young). 

 Old Dutch cirawing.3 



hunter, while the sleeping animal hangs by its large tusks to a 

 cleft of the rock, cutting out a piece of its skin and fastening to 



1 I saw in 1858 a Phoca harhata with tusks worn away by age, which 

 in its reddisli-brown colour very much resembled a walrus, and was little 

 inferior to it in size. 



- Albertus Magnus, De animalihus, Mantua, 1479, Lib. xxiv. At the 

 same place however is given a description of the whale-fishery grounded 

 on actual experience, but with the shrewd addition that what the old 

 authors had written on the subject did not correspond with experience. 



3 This drawing is made after a facsimile by Frederick Miiller from 

 Hessel Gerritz, Descriptio et delineatio geographica detcctionis freii, &c. 

 Amsterodami, 1613. Tlie same drawing is reproduced coloured in Blavii 

 Atkis major, Part I., 1665, p. 25, with the inscription: "Ad vivum 

 delineatum ab Hesselo G.A." 



