The Natural History of the Polar Bear. 269 



They do not eat grass because they are hungry, for I have 

 found seal and grass together in their stomachs and intes- 

 tines, and observed on one occasion that a bear directly after 

 a meal of seal, went three miles for grass, of which it ate a 

 quantity. It appears as though a bear feels a necessity for 

 some vegetable food; possibly health has something to do 

 with it. 



Since seal is their chief food, it is natural that they 

 should be numerous in the vicinity of seal-holes. This often 

 accounts for them being met high up sounds and fiords, as 

 far as eighteen or twenty miles from the nearest open water. 

 They confine their perambulations for the most part to the 

 floe-ice — whether it be fixed land-floe, or moving pack, or 

 even small pieces of drift ice, is immaterial to them. They 

 often take their passage from one place to another upon this 

 moving ice, but they are occasionally to be found on the 

 land, even apparently being aware of short cuts across a 

 comparatively narrow piece of ice-covered land three miles 

 wide, for their tracks have been noted as crossing such a 

 stretch of low land from one to two hundred feet above the 

 sea. Their tracks have also been seen ascending high land, 

 as though they went up for the purpose of a look-out, such 

 as they frequently do by ascending an iceberg. They pick 

 the best path through hummocky ice, and many travellers 

 have found it wise to follow their tracks. 



I have ample evidence to show that the sight of the bear 

 cannot be very sharp, besides the anatomical reason that 

 the eye is small, is generally of a grey, dead fish's-eyelike 

 colour, and the optic nerve not large — less in size, in fact, 

 than the human. Similarly, hearing I judge not to be acute. 

 In marked contrast, however, is his keenness of scent : by 

 scent he guides himself to his prey, and the bears which 

 visited our station invariably came up from leeward. On 

 one occasion I saw a very good example of this. I was 

 watching a she-bear with a cub; she was slowly moving 

 along the edge of the land-floe about a mile and a half away, 

 and at last arrived in a direct line to leeward of our station, 

 whereupon she suddenly became alert, sniffed in the air to 

 windward, and came up at a canter. When the wind blew 



