OTARIES AND SEALS 



pedia are most nearly allied. An alternative name to 

 otary as applied to the whole group is eared seal ; both 

 these names embody a fact which is of considerable 

 importance for the discrimination of these aquatic 

 carnivora from seals and walruses. They possess 

 indeed a tiny external ear, the conch as it is called, 

 which is completely absent in the seals. The seals and 

 walruses have to get along with a mere hole in the, side 

 of the head, and are in the position of a seventeenth 

 century political or religious offender, who has had his 

 ears cropped. The persistence of this external ear is 

 one of several features in which the otaries have retained 

 more of the characteristics of a land-living ancestor than 

 have the seals. Other points which can be readily seen 

 in the living examples at the Zoo are the following. The 

 fore and hind flippers are not merely flippers as they are 

 in the seal ; indeed in the latter animal, the hind 

 flippers are, as it were, soldered to the tail, and form 

 with it a single steering apparatus. In the sea lions and 

 sea bears the flippers have still got some independent 

 movement and their possessors can shuffle along on the 

 land in a successful if awkward fashion, while the seal 

 can merely wriggle along as would a man whose legs 

 and arms had been tied to his body. More than this, 

 the nostrils are at the end of the snout in otaries, and on 

 the upper surface in seals, a position which is more 

 convenient in an aquatic animal whose aim in life 

 it is to respire at the surface of the water with as little 

 as possible of the body showing. These various features 

 lead us to the not unnatural inference that the true seals 

 have been for a longer period adapted to a purely 

 aquatic existence than have the sea lions. The more 

 obvious neck contrasting with the " bull neck " of seals 

 is a fact to be urged as pointing in the same direction, 

 while the claws on the hands and feet, though also to be 

 regarded as survivals, are to be met with in the seals, 



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