THE FUR-SEAL ISLANDS OF ALASKA. 107 



Age of females when first pregnant. — As to the time when the virgin cow is first covered by the bull, 

 I found a strange medley of ideas among the people on the island. The common opinion of the others and the 

 natives was, that they were not covered until they were three years of age, bringing forth their first young in the 

 former case (i. e, the generally accepted versions), when they reached their fourth year. But this, on examination, was 

 not a difficult problem at all to solve. The evidence every year decides, while the yearlings are driven up to the 

 village in the fall, that although to external appearance there is no difference between the sexes, an examination 

 conclusively established the fact, that the yearling females herded with the yearling males on the hauling-grounds, 

 each about equal in number, and also when the balance of the "holluschickie", two-year-olds and upward, were 

 driven in they never found a female* in the droves. Where were these two-year-old females then"? They were not 

 upon the hauling-grounds with the yearling females and bachelors. Where were they ? The answer is, they have 

 come up on the breeding-grounds, clothed with desire and supplied with physical life to meet prospective maternity. 



Relative duration of life: Terrestrial reproduction. — This fact also shows that, as the female fur- 

 seal is so conspicuously inferior to the male, physically viewed, as to size and weight, so also is her life lessened. 

 In other words, when she is matured, as she must be by her third year, in bearing then her first pup, she can 

 reasonably be expected to live no longer than nine or ten years, according to the general natural law governing this 

 question; while the male, not coming to his maturity and physical prime until he is five or six years of age, lives, 

 in obedience to the same law, fifteen or twenty years. Thus living longer than the temale, being six times as strong 

 and heavy, lie is the most eminent of all polygamists known to the brute world. Why should he fight six weeks or 

 two months, uninterruptedly, a succession of bloody battles with his own kind, if the younger seals could reach his 

 wives in the water? No; the cows land to give birth to their young, and they must be on that land to receive 

 the effectual fecundation of their kind. Let no man be deceived, therefore, in looking over the myriads of hundreds 

 of thousands of young males seen every season up here, and think that the battles of the old ''seecatchie" are matters 

 of brutal pomp and circumstance, so far as the reproduction of their race is involved. Let that man look well to 

 the conditions of the males on these breeding-grounds, and the females with them, if he would regard intelligently 

 the condition of the seal-life for the present season, and its prospect for the future. 



Fighting: Old and young males. — The males under six years of age, although hovering about the sea- 

 margins of the breeding-grounds, do not engage in much fighting there ; it is the six and seven year-old males, 

 ambitious and flushed with their reproductive consciousness, that swarm out and do battle with the older ones 

 on these places. The young male of this latter class is, however, no real match for a fifteen or twenty-year- 

 old bull; provided, that the aged "seecatchie" retains his teeth; since, with these weapons, his relatively harder 

 thews and sinews give him the advantage in almost every instance, among the hundreds of combats which I have 

 witnessed. Those trials of strength between the old and the young are incessant until the rookeries are mapped out ; 

 and by common consent the males of all classes recognize the coming of the females. After their arrival and 

 settlement over the whole extent of the breeding-grounds, about the 15th July at the latest, very little fighting 

 takes placet 



Only one pup born at time of parturition. — Touching the number of young born, at a birth, the most 

 diligent inquiry and scrutiny of observation on the rookeries has satisfied me that it is confined to a single pup. 



* i. e.. nubile female. 



t It Las been suggested to me that the exquisite power of scent possessed by these animals enable them to reach the breeding-grounds 

 at about the place where they left them the season previously; surely the nose of the fur-seal is endowed to a superlative degree with 

 those organs of smell, and its range of appreciation in this respect must be very great. 



"In carnivorous quadrupeds the structure of the bones of the nasal cavities is more intricate than in tbe herbivorous, and is calculated 

 to afford a far more extensive surface for the distribution of the nerve. In the seal this conformation is most fully developed and tho 

 bony plates are here not turbinated, but ramified, as shown in the wood-cut. Eight or more principal branches rise from the main trunk, 

 and each of these is divided and subdivided to an extreme degree of minuteness, so as to form in all many hundred plates. The olfactory 

 membrane, with all its nerves, is closely applied to every plate in this vast assemblage, as well as to the main trunk and to the internal 

 surface of the surrounding cavity, so that its extent cannot be less than 120 square inches in each nostril. An organ of such exquisite 

 sensibility requires an extraordinary provision for securing it against injury, and nature has supplied a mechanism for the purpose, 

 enabling the animal to close at pleasure the orifice of the nostril." [Harwood: Camp., Anat., and Physiol., Bridgewater Treatise, vol. ii, p. 

 402. J 



I noticed in all sleeping and waking seals that the nasal apertures were never widely expanded; and that they were at intervals 

 rapidly opened and closed with inhalation and exhalation of each breath ; the nostrils of the fur-seal are, as a rule, well opened when 

 the animal is out of water, and remain so while it is on land. 



The distances at sea, away from the Pribylov islands, in which fur-seals are found during tbe breeding-season, are very considerable, 

 scattered records have been made of seeing large bauds of them during August as far down the northwest coast as they probably range 

 at any season of the year, viz, well out at sea in the latitude of Cape Flattery, 47° to 49° south latitude. In the winter and spring, up 

 to middle of June, all classes are found here spread over wide areas of the ocean; then, by the 15th June they will have all departed, 

 the first and the latest, en route for the Pribylov islands. Then, when seen again in this extreme southern range, I presume tho 

 unusually early examples of return, toward the end of August, are squads of tbe yearlings of both sexes, for this division is always the 

 last to land on, and the first to leave, the seal-islands, annually. Also, the two-year-old females which have been covered on the breeding- 

 grounds, during June and July, undoubtedly stray back to sea, and down again from the Pribylov group, very early in August, some of 

 them as far as the coast-heads of Fuca straits; at least, many of them at one time are never seen massed on the rookeries, and as tbey 

 do not consort with the "holluschickie" and yearlings on land, quite a Dumber of their large aggregate doubtless make frequent and 

 extended fishing excursions during the height of the breeding-season. 



