II.] ANTARCTIC FAUNA 361 



the purpose of procuring food. The old seals showed very little 

 fear, and would generally allow us to handle their young without 

 much tendency to interfere. 



The young were born in a thick and woolly coat of dull ochre 

 grey and black, showing something of the markings which would 

 appear later on in the adult. This woolly coat began to drop off 

 at the end of fourteen days, and by the end of a month the moult 

 was finished. The young seal, attired now in a very handsome 

 coat of glossy black and silver hair, could for the first time enter 

 the water and take a share in finding its own food. Still, for a 

 variable time, these young were suckled on the ice, but sooner or 

 later they would be separated from their parents, and from that 

 time onward would lead an independent life. The Weddell seal 

 takes at least two years to arrive at full maturity, and the size of 

 the animal appears to increase considerably for many years, if one 

 may judge by the immensity of some of the oldest breeding bulls 

 and cows, compared with what were evidently younger ones. 



The teeth of the Weddell are less strikingly adapted to a 

 special food than are those of the Crab-eater or the Ross ; but 

 the incisors are again recurved and hook-like, to assist the 

 canines in procuring fish. The bigger teeth in an old seal are 

 often broken and worn down almost to the gums by the habit 

 of using them to enlarge the blow-holes in the ice. On several 

 occasions this habit was actually watched in progress, and the 

 action was somewhat like that of a centre-bit, the central fixed 

 point being the sharp teeth of the lower jaw, while the upper jaw 

 was revolved upon it. 



The bulls have desperate fights with one another for the 

 possession of the females, and their coats are cut to pieces by 

 December. From head to tail they are at this time covered with 

 ugly sores, and are to be found in secluded corners amongst the 

 hummocks of ice-pressure ridges, often apparently feeling far from 

 well, and unwilling to fight again. 



Old seals at the point of death retire to the most secluded 

 spots. It was therefore not altogether unaccountable to find the 

 remains of dead seals many miles from the actual coast, and high 

 up on the biggest glaciers. Almost all the sledging expeditions 

 which made their way to the west up the glaciers of the Royal 

 Society range of mountains found these dead seals ; and they 

 included not Weddells only, but Crab-eaters, of which we saw 

 only very few in McMurdo Sound during the whole two years that 



