CHE THR XLV 
CARNIVORA (CONTINUED )—PINNIPEDIA (SEALS AND WALRUSES)— 
CREODONTA 
SUB-ORDER 2. PINNIPEDIA 
Tus group includes the Seals, Sea-Lions, and Walruses,’ all 
aquatic and, for the larger part, marine creatures. Being aquatic 
they have to some extent acquired a fish-hke form, though not 
so completely as have the Whales and even the Sirenia. This 
is most complete so far as the group is concerned in the Seals, 
where the hind-limbs have become soldered to the tail and are 
inefficient as walking legs, where the external ears have vanished, 
and where the general shape of the body is tapering and thus 
fish-like. The Walruses and Sea-Lions are less modified in this 
direction ; in the latter (not in the former) the external ear, 
though small, is persistent, and the hind-lmbs are capable of 
being used as organs of progression upon dry land. The general 
characters applicable to the Carnivora, given upon a previous 
page, apply to the Pinnipedia. 
The characters confined to the Pinnipedia as a whole are 
mainly these:—The greater part of the limbs are enclosed 
within the skin, the hands and feet are fully webbed, and 
there is a tendency for the nails to disappear, and for the 
phalanges to increase in number—characters which are clearly 
not diagnostic of the order but correlated with an aquatic 
life, since they reappear, and are indeed exaggerated, in the 
Cetacea. The teeth are peculiar in that the milk dentition is 
feeble and is early shed. This, as it were, undue emphasis upon 
one of the two sets of teeth is another likeness to the Whales, 
1 For the genera of Pinnipedia see Mivart, Proc. Zool. Soc. 1885, p. 484. 
