ALLEN: mammalia: otariid^. 115 



the Sea Lions and the Sea Bears were made known with admirable detail 

 and clearness, and for nearly a century this memoir remained our chief 

 source of information respecting them. 



It was, however, quite different with the large Pinnipeds of the south- 

 ern hemisphere, including the Sea Elephant as well as the Sea Lions and 

 the Sea Bears. They were first made known by the early voyagers to the 

 Southern Seas, as Dampier (1697), Freizer (1717), Anson (1748), Byron 

 (1769), Pernetty (1770), Forster {1777), Cook (1784), Weddell (1825), and 

 others, who gave, however, only very imperfect and erroneous accounts 

 of them ; and yet they were taken by systematists many years later as 

 the basis of supposed species, notably by Desmarest (181 7 and 1820) 

 and Lesson (1828). Thus each of the South American species was named 

 over and over again by compilers who apparently, in most instances, had 

 never seen a specimen of any of them. The early voyagers appear to 

 have taken home very few specimens, and these were not always correctly 

 labelled as to locality of capture. Thus, as in the case of the Commodore 

 Byron skull, already mentioned, they were sometimes attributed to locali- 

 ties remote from the home of any species of Pinniped, and in other cases it 

 was uncertain whether the specimen came from the vicinity of Cape Horn, 

 or the Cape of Good Hope, or the Australian seas, the locality being 

 finally given as the "Antarctic Seas," or as "unknown." In some cases 

 the specimen consisted of a skin without a skull, sometimes of a very 

 young animal, as in the case of Pennant's Eared Seal and Buffon's Petit 

 Phoque ; in other cases of a skull without the skin, sometimes adult, 

 sometimes young. While these animals were being slaughtered on their 

 breeding grounds by sealers, for their skins or oil, by the tens of thou- 

 sands annually during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of 

 the nineteenth centuries, and their habits and haunts had become well 

 known, scarcely a specimen reached any of the scientific museums of 

 Europe, or fell under the observation of competent naturalists. It was 

 not apparently till about 1840 that any mammalogist had had speci- 

 mens of the northern and southern sea lions for comparison, when Miiller 

 found skulls of both in the Berlin Museum, and was able to confirm for 

 the first time their specific distinctions by actual comparison of their skulls. 

 In the Paris and London Museums there were a few skulls of the southern 

 species, but none of the northern, until about 1859, when a skull of this 

 animal reached the British Museum, received from California, and was 



