SEALS AND WHALES OF THE BRLTLSH SEAS. 21 



The molar teeth in this species are arranged in a straight line along 

 the jaws, and not obliquely, as in the common species. As this Seal is 

 very likely to pass unnoticed, should it occur on our coast, it will be 

 well to bear in mind that this arrangement of the molars will at once 

 distinguish it from Ph. vitidina, the only species with which it is likely to be 

 confounded. Professor Flower has given a minute description of the skull of' 

 the Norfolk specimen in the ^ Proc. Zool. Soc.'' for 1871, pp. 506-12. The 

 figure of this species is copied from Karl Thorin's ' Grundlinier Zoologiens 

 Studium,' p. 53 (Stockholm, 1868). 



THE GREENLAND SEAL. 



The claims of the Greenland Seal, PJioca grceniandica (Fab.), to a 

 place in the British Fauna, although long considered highly probable, were 

 not rendered perfectly conclusive until 1874, when they were satisfac- 

 torily established by Professor Turner's identification of a Seal killed in 

 January, 1868, near the viaduct on the Lancaster and Ulverstone Railway, 

 and now preserved in the Kendal Museum. Professor Turner (' Journal 

 of Anatomy and Physiology] vol. ix. p. 163) says that he has himself 

 examined this specimen, and found the dentition exactly to agree with 

 that of the skulls of the Greenland Seals with which he compared it. The 

 individual in question, a male, measured six feet from the tip of the nose 

 to the " point of the hind toes," and the colour indicated the age to be about 

 three years. Previously to this, the claims of this species to a place in our 

 list rested principally upon the skulls of two Seals killed in the Severn, and 

 exhibited by Dr. Reilly at the meeting of the British Association at Bristol 

 in 1836. These skulls were at first referred by Professor Nilsson to Ph. 



i) 



