228 ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 



Sea EGGS OR sea urchins : ToxoPNEUSTES. — Frequently the natives 

 have brought a dish of sea urchins' viscera for our table, offering it 

 as a great delicacy. 1 do not think any of us did more than taste 

 it. Tbe native women are the chief hunters for Echinoidw, and during 

 the whole spring and summer seasons they may be seen at both islands 

 wading in the pools at low water with their scanty skirts high up, 

 eagerly laying possessive hands upon every "bristling" egg that shows 

 itself. They vary this search by poking with a short-handled hook into 

 holes and rocky crevices for a small cottoid fish, which is also found here 

 at low water in this manner. Specimens of this " kalog," which I brought 

 down, declared themselves as representatives of a new departure from 

 all other recognized forms in which the seulpin is known to sportj hence 

 the name, generic and specific, MeUetes papilio. 



The "sand-cake," Echinarachnius sp., is also very common here. 



Fine table crab: Chionoecetes. — By the 28th of May to the 

 middle of June a fine table crab, large, fat, and sweet, with alight, 

 brittle shell, is taken while it is skurrying in and out of the lagoon as 

 the tide ebbs and Hows. It is the best-llavored crustacean known to 

 Alaskan waters; they are taken nowhere else — at St. Paul; and when 

 on St. George I failed to see one. I am not certain as to the accuracy 

 of the season of riiuiiing, viz, 28th May to 15th June, inasmuch as that 

 one of my little notebooks on which this date is recorded turns out 

 missing at the present writing, and I am obliged to give it from mem- 

 ory. The only economic shelltish Avhich the islands afford is embodied 

 in the Chiona'cete.s opilio ( ?). The natives affirm the existence of mus- 

 sels here in abundance when the Pribilof group was first discovered, 

 but now only a small supply of inferior sizeandquantity is tobefound. 



Marine skeleton makers: Beautiful work of sea fleas. — 

 The service which swarms of Amphidous crustaceans rendered me in 

 cleaning the bones of birds, fish, and even seals, can not be too highly 

 eulogized. Only in that small bight, however, known as the "Cove," 

 near the village of St. Paul, could 1 get the work done, because at no 

 other spot on the Pribilof Islands was the sea water quiet enough. By 

 taking common hard-bread boxes, which the company's agent gave me 

 from the store, and substituting a slatted cover, I would, by rock 

 ballastfng, sink this with fifteen or twenty bird carcasses in the water 

 here at low tide. When a single fiow and ebb had taken place I had 

 the box taken promptly out, never failing to find every skeleton per- 

 fectly polished, yet entirely articulated. The most delicate bones in a 

 fish's head or fins were intact. The strong food which the blubber of 

 the seal carcasses affords acts so as to gorge and stupefy these little 

 ghouls of the ocean, lor I did not succeed well at all with such attempts. 

 The bones of GaUorhinus would have to lay submerged in the cove for 

 weeks, sometimes, ere they were eaten free of flesh, fat, etc.; then, 

 when taken out, they would be sadly discolored by the salt water, 

 turned black and dingy in streaks and sections. 



NOTES on the plants. 



The principal vegetation of the Pribilof group: Absence 

 OF TREES. — That spruce trees can be made to live transplanted from 

 indigenous localities to the barren slopes of the Aleutian Islands has 

 been demonstrated; but in living, these trees scarcely grow to any. 

 appreciable degree. Evergreens were transferred to Unalaska when 

 Yeniaminov was at work there in 1830-1835. They are still standing 

 and keep green, yet the change which such a long lapse of time should 



