SEALS. 171 



fessed naturalists — hence the changes they may (many 

 of them, at least) undergo in their progress from youth 

 to maturity, the duration of their lives, the rapidity of 

 their growth, and many points in their economy are yet 

 desiderata. Who has counted the years of the whale ; 

 who has marked an individual from birth, till, one of 

 the patriarchs of its oceanic race, it has failed beneath 

 the burden of ages ? Who has tracked these colossal 

 beings in their migrations, or patiently studied their 

 nicer instincts, their less prominent manners and habits? 

 — Their ways are hidden in the deep, and the little that 

 we' know of them is the result of accumulated but for- 

 tuitous observation, to which commerce has impelled a 

 daring class of men, whose great object is their de- 

 struction. Much information will be doubtless added from 

 time to time, but, after all, many points will necessarily 

 remain beyond our powers of acquisition. 



We may conclude by observing that the chase of the 

 whale was carried on by the Norwegians as early as the 

 ninth century, principally, as it would appear, for the 

 sake of its flesh, which was accounted a delicacy. For- 

 merly a species of whalo abounded in the Bay of Biscay, 

 and was killed by the inhabitants of the coast for the 

 same object, till at length it was driven away from that 

 bay by incessant persecution ; the Biscayan mariners 

 then carried the navigation farther and farther from their 

 own shores, till at last they approached the coasts of 

 Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland ; and thus was 

 commenced, in the course of the sixteenth century, the 

 northern whale fishery as pursued in modern times ; the 

 object being not the flesh of the animal, but the blubber 

 and baleen. 



Family— PHOCIDiE (Seals). 



Of all four- limbed mammalia the seals (Phocidae) are 

 those which most display in every part of their organiza- 

 tion a fitness for the watery element. The body is 

 elongated and conical, tapering from the chest to the 

 tail (see skeleton, Fig. 112), the pelvis being so narrow 



