414 RESULTS. 



I have also examined skins taken by hunters from the Bering Sea, 

 and there is even a greater proportion of females than among those 

 taken on the coast. It is easier to distinguish the females in the Bering 

 Sea skins, for the teats are fully developed from the seals suckling their 

 young and they are caught while in the sea searching for food. The 

 fur on the belly of these female seals is very poor and thin, owing to 

 the swelling and fever in the teats, caused by suckling. Oftentimes 

 female skins are found with big bare spots round the teats, due to the 

 same cause. 



At that time [1805] he made his purchases from the Indians on the west- 

 ern coast of the American continent, who offered to 



Herman Liebes, p. 512. him only the skins of female seals; that the price 

 he originally paid for them was as low as 50 cents 

 per skin; that he offered the Indians a much higher price for male 

 skins, and was told by them that the male seals could not be caught, 

 and that many Indians whom he has personally seen kill seals and from 

 whom he has bought skins, have told told him that male seals and the 

 young cows were too active to be caught and that it was only the fe- 

 male seals heavy with young which they could catch. The males, for 

 instance, as deponent was told by the seal-hunters, come up to the sur- 

 face of the water after diving often as much as a mile from the place 

 they went down, whereas the females can, when pregnant, hardly dive 

 at all. 



Deponent says that from his own observation of live seals during 

 many years, and from his personal inspection of the skins, he knows 

 the difference between the skin of a female seal and a male seal to be 

 very marked, and that the two are easily distinguishable. The skin 

 of a female seal shows the marks of the breasts, about which there is 

 no fur. The belly of the female seal is barren of fur also, whereas on 

 the male the fur is thick and evenly distributed. The female seal has 

 a much narrower head than the male seal, and this difference is appar- 

 ent in the skins; also that the differences between the male and fe- 

 male skins are so marked that there is now and always has been a dif- 

 ference in the price of the two of from 300 to 500 per cent. For exam- 

 ple, at the last sales in London, on the 22d day of January, 1802, there 

 were sold 30,000 female skins at a price of 40 shillings apiece, and 13,000 

 male seals at a price of 130 shillings apiece on an average. 



Second. That from the year 1864 down to the present day deponent 

 or his firm have been large purchasers of seal-skins on the western coast 

 of America from the Indians and residents on the British coast; and 

 deponent believes that he has handled nearly three-fourths of the catch 

 from that time down to the present. That during the whole of this 

 period he has purchased from 3,000 to 40,000 seal skins a year, and that 

 he has personally inspected and physically handled the most of the 

 skins so bought by him or his firm. 



That from the year 1880 he has been in the habit of buying skins 

 from American and English vessels engaged in what is now known as 

 poaching, and that he has personally inspected every cargo bought and 

 seen unloaded from the poaching vessels, and subsequently seen and 

 superintended the unpacking of the same in his own warehouse; that 

 the most of the skins above mentioned as purchased by him have been 

 bought from the poaching vessels, and that of the skins so bought from 

 the vessels known as poachers, deponent says that at least 00 per cent 

 of the total number of skins were those of female seals, and that the 

 skins of male seals found among those cargoes were the skins of very 



