SEALS. 3 
intrepid navigator as naturalists; and the materials which they 
brought home were well collated together by Pennant, in his 
‘History of Quadrupeds,’ a work of very extraordinary merit 
considering the date of its publication. England might then 
fairly be described as taking, as she should do, a lead in scientific 
- Zoology : this period has not been fairly estimated by the modern 
_ school of Zoologists, who, at the opening of the Continent after 
the war, appear to have been so dazzled by the brilliant progress 
made by the Professors named by Napoleon, that they overlooked 
the fact that these men were only following in the footsteps of 
Pennant, Latham, Solander, the Forsters, Fabricius, and others, 
who were either natives of, or had been fostered by, the scientific 
_ men of this country, as Linnzeus followed in the footsteps of Ray. 
Besides the particulars given by Cook and Forster in the ac- 
count of their voyages, Forster communicated to Buffon the 
figures of two of the species he had observed, accompanied by 
details of their organization and habits, which were printed in 
the supplementary volumes of Buffon’s Natural History, and 
form the most complete and best account we have yet had of the 
history of these species. 
Peron and Lesueur, in their record of Baudin’s Voyage, indi- 
- eated some Seals found in the South Sea, and give fuller details 
of the Sea-Elephant, they having been so fortunate as to fall in 
_ with some males of that species; but the Natural History of the 
_ voyage was never published, so that we are indebted to Cuvier 
(Oss. Foss.) for the description of the only Seal they brought 
home, which appears to have been the Fur Seal of commerce. 
In the Zoology of Captain Duperrey’s ‘ Voyage of the Co- 
- quille,’ a Seal is figured, under the name of Phoca Molossina ; 
but the skull and skin, now in the Paris Museum, as Nilsson has 
- correctly observed, is only the young Sea-Lion’s. In the ‘ Voy- 
age of the Astrolabe’ two other southern Seals are figured; one 
_ealled Otaria cinerea, Peron, which appears to be the Fur Seal 
of commerce, and the Otaria australis, which is very like my 
_ Arctocephalus lobatus, described from a skull m Mr. Brookes’s 
collection many years previously. It is to be regretted, that the 
figures here referred to, especially of the skull, are so bad as to 
be utterly useless for the determination of the species without 
comparison of the original specimens. 
In the French ‘ Voyage to the South Pole,’ now in course of 
publication, figures are given of the Sea-Leopard and the com- 
mon White Antarctic Seal, which they name Phoca carcino- 
phaga, the two most common species found everywhere in these 
regions on the packed ice. 
Mr. W. Hamilton has given an account of the Seals and 
other marme Mammalia, in Sir W. Jardine’s ‘ Naturalists’ Li- 
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