14 



SEAL I'J.iri'KKS. 



A.N. P. wi'ites as follows : — 



The late Frank Biickland told a story of liow lie was 

 once snubbed by an old sailor for telling liini that a whale 

 was not a fish. " Hang it. man," said the old salt, " I have 

 been at sea, man and boy, for 40 years, and you now tell nie 

 that a whale is not a fish." And the indignant tar would not 

 even deign to ask Mr. Buekland what he would make out a 

 whale to be. There are no doubt many other people, lands- 

 men and seamen Ijoth, who hold the same opinion as dirl the 

 old sailor with regard to the zoological position of the whale. 

 But we imagine there are very few who would take a seal to 

 be a fish, though what a seal may be, beyond being simply a 

 seal, it is not at first sight easy to make out. That it 

 cannot, pi'operly speaking, be called a fish is plain. Its 

 body, looked at in a general way, is certainly unfishlike in 

 appearance, Ijut its head and neck are those of a lieast, not 

 to speak of its fur ; it lives in water it is true, but it breathes 

 air. It is a sort of thing that is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. 

 Perhaps it is a transitional form between the fish of the sea 

 and the beasts of the eai-th. 



The question was one which we thought our young 

 friend, " the jjrofessor," whose observations concerning the 

 shark were by no means uninteresting, would be best able 

 to answer ; so W'e. referred it to him, suggesting that, if there 

 were any Irutii in niodi'rn zoological theories, the seal might be the transitional form which led from fishes to higher 

 animals. "Oh, no," said the professor, " on the contrary, the seal is an instance of a being belonging to a higher type 

 degenerating into the habits and form of a lower. Seals and walruses are true niannnals, as, indeed are those more extreme 

 forms, the whales ; they give birth to young, which are unable to feed tliemselves, as do the highest class of animals, and 

 they suckle them with mother's nnlk. There is abundant evidence to show that the ancestors of seals were land animals 



— beasts of prey, similar in many respects to the bear. A hasty glance 

 at a seal might not, perhaps, lead you to suppose that it had hands and 

 feet, or rather foie paws and hind paws. Yet when you look at it more 

 carefully you perceive that its flippers are in every important respect 

 like hands, there being a wrist and five fingers provided with nails ; 

 and what, when hastily glanced at, appears to be analogous to a w bale's 

 or (hilphin's tale, is really the two hind feet stretched backwards and 

 permanently tied in that position Ijy strong folds of skin ; each foot, 

 you will observe, has five toes with toe-nails, and the little stumpy tail 

 lies between the two feet. A man who came across the skeleton of a 

 seal, unless he were versed in osteology, would have great difficulty in 

 distinguishing it from that of an ordinary quadruped ; the arm and 

 leg bones, wrists, and ankles, and phalanges would be all there, the 

 only readily noticeable feature lieing the exceeding shortness of the 

 arms and legs and the undue length of the paws. The ordinary seal 

 lias no external ear ; liut in those seals which are called sea-lions and 

 -sea-bears, and sometimes eared seals, thereis the remains of an external 

 ear. very small and rudimentary, and, apparently, quite useless ; Init, 

 by its very presence, bearing witness to the seal's ancestral descent. 

 Now, the ordinary seal can make no use whatever of its hind feet when 

 on land, and its fore feet being buried up to the wrists in the body of 

 the animal, can be used only very clumsily for walking. But in the 

 eared seals, whose rudimentary ears seem to indicate that they are 

 not so far removed as are the common seals from their quadrupedal 

 ancestors, the limbs are less modified. The hind legs, though stretched 

 backwards when tlie creature swims in water, are not tied back 

 permanently by folds of the skin, ami its fore legs are not buried in the 

 liody, but from the elbow downwards are quite free. Hence, when 

 the sea-bear is on land, it can stan<l on all fours, and can even scratch its head with its hind foot.'' 



" .\s to the evidence of a seal's affinity to a bear," continued the profe.ssor, "it lies chiefly in the skull. The 

 arrangement of the bones in the skull is one of the most permanent characters which di-stinguish groups of animals, and is 

 much less liable to \:iriatioii than are the disposition of tlie limbs or the conformation of the Ixidy. The skulls of the 

 -■11 red seals and of the walrus have f(nir decided features, wliicli are characteristicallj' ursine. All the pinnipedia resemble 

 bears in having tlie five iligits com]dete in both the fore and hind feet; and the eared seals and walrus resemble bears in 

 |)lantiiig the whole extent of the foot down upon the ground — that is to say, in being plantigrade. The walrus again 

 resembles bears in having three bronchial tubes, instead of only two, as other mammals have. There is one very 

 interesting and suggestive fact which I should not omit to mention to yon. While the skull of the eared seal resembles 

 very strongly that of a bear, the skull of the common seal retains those ursine features in a less pronounced degree, and in 

 place of them has already put on many c^etai^eaii i-liaracters — so much so that, as an eminent naturalist has pointed out, 

 ' if the supra-orbital processes were sawn off, a porpoise's brain-case would closely resemble a seal's.' " 



It woidd not have done to confess ignorance liefore the professor, or else we might have admitted oursehes surprised 

 at his coupling porpoises with seals. Many of our readers, no doubt, have often varied the monotony of a sea voyage by 

 watching the porpoises playing and diving about the steamer, and have probably made them the topic of conversation 



rKKKORMtNi; SKAI,.S. 



