413 



BEAR. 



BEAR. 



brings it to the whale ships. Sir John Richardson says, that it does 

 not disdain, in the absence of other food, to seek the shore in quest 

 of berries and roots. The Polar Bear moves faster on firm ground 

 than might be supposed from his appearance. Captain Lyon describes 

 its pace when at full speed, as " a kind of shuffle, as quick as the 

 sharp gallop of a horse." 



This species is of a more lengthened form than that of the others, 

 the head ia very much elongated and flattened, the ears and mouth 

 comparatively small, the neck very long and thick, and the sole of the 

 foot very large. The fur is silvery-white tinged with yellow, close 

 short and even on the head, neck, and upper part of the back ; long 

 fine and inclined to be woolly on the hinder parts, legs, and belly. 

 The sole of the foot exhibits a beautiful instance of adaptation of 

 means to an end, for it is almost entirely covered with long hair, 

 affording the animal a firm footing on the ice. The claws are black, 

 not much curved, thick and short. Captain Lyon's crew found none 

 of the terrible effects (skin peeling off, &c., &c.) from eating the flesh, 

 ascribed to it by some of the earlier voyagers. 



The accounts given of the size, strength, and ferocity of this animal 

 by the early navigators are appalling ; but the accuracy of modern 

 investigation has dissipated a good deal of the awe with which it was 

 regarded, and has gone far to prove, that the excited imagination of 

 some of the narrators has led them beyond the truth. 



The gallant adventurers who conducted the modern northern 

 expeditions penetrated far beyond the points formerly reached, and 

 had opportunities of observing numbers of Polar Bears. The greatest 

 length from nose to tail, recorded by Captain Phipps, is 7 feet 

 1 inch, the weight of the beast being 610 pounds. Sir John Ross 

 records the measurement of 7 feet 10 inches, and the weight of 

 1160 pounds ; and Captain Lyon states, that one which was unusually 

 large measured 8 feet 74 inches, and weighed 1600 pounds. The 

 greater number of full grown individuals are spoken of as far inferior 

 to these in dimensions and weight. 



Two very fine specimens are at present living in the gardens of 

 the Zoological Society, Regent's Park. 



Pennant states that Polar Bears are frequent on all the Asiatic 

 coasts of the Frozen Ocean-, from the mouth of the Obi eastward, 

 and that they abound in Nova Zembla, Cherry Island, Spitzbergen, 

 Greenland, Labrador, and the coasts of Baffin's and Hudson's bays, 

 but that they are unknown on the shores of the White Sea. Sir 

 Edward Parry saw them within Barrow's Straits as far as Melville 

 Island ; and, during his daring boat-voyage, beyond 82 N. lat. Sir 

 John Richardson says, that the limit of their incursions southward 

 on the shores of Hudson's Bay and of Labrador, may be stated to be 

 about the 55th parallel. Sir John Franklin learnt from the Esquimaux 

 to the westward of Mackenzie River, that they occasionally, though 

 rarely, visited that coast. Captain Beechey did not meet with any in 

 his voyage to Icy Cape. 



As the Polar Bear resides principally on the fields of ice, he is 

 frequently drifted far from the land. " In this way," says Sir 

 John Richardson, " they are often carried from the coast of Greenland 

 to Iceland, where they commit such ravages on the flocks that the 

 inhabitants rise in a body to destroy them." 



The Esquimaux account of the hybernation of this species is thus 

 related by Captain Lyon : 



" At the commencement of winter the pregnant she-bears are very 

 fat, and always solitary. When a heavy fall of snow sets in, the 

 animal seeks some hollow place in which she can lie down, and then 

 remains quiet while the snow covers her. Sometimes she will wait 

 until a quantity of snow has fallen, and then digs herself a cave : at 

 all events, it seems necessary that she should be covered by and lie 

 amongst snow. She now goes to sleep, and does not wake until the 

 spring sun i pretty high, when she brings forth her two cubs. The 

 cave, by this time, has become much larger, by the effect of the animal's 

 warmth and breath, so that the cubs have room enough to move, 

 and they acquire considerable strength by continually sucking. The 

 dam at length becomes so thin and weak, that it is with great difficulty 

 she extricates herself, when the sun is powerful enough to throw a 

 strong glare through the snow which roofs the den. The Esquimaux 

 affirm, that during this long confinement the bear has no evacuations, 

 and is herself the means of preventing them by shopping all the 

 natural passages with moss, grass, or earth. The natives find and 

 kill the bears during their confinement by means of dogs, which scent 

 them through the snow, and begin scratching and howling very 

 eagerly. As it would be unsafe to make a large opening, a long trench 

 is cut, of sufficient width to enable a man to look down, and see 

 where the bear's head lies, and he then selects a mortal part into 

 which he thrusts his spear. The old one being killed, the hole is 

 broken open, and the young cubs may be taken out by hand, as, 

 having tasted no blood, and never having been at liberty, they are 

 then very harmless and quiet. Females which are not pregnant roam 

 throughout the whole winter in the same manner as the males. The 

 coupling time is in May." 



That part of these accounts which relates to the non-hybernatiou 

 of some of these bears is corroborated by Sir Edward Parry, who 

 saw them roaming in the course of the two winters which he passed 

 on the coast of Melville Peninsula. 



That the Polar Bear will subsist on vegetable diet was proved in 



the case of two which lived and throve for years in the French 

 menagerie without being allowed to touch animal food. The indi- 

 vidual kept in the Tower in the reign of Henry III. seems to have 

 been indulged in diet and recreation more congenial to its habits, for 

 there are two of the king's writs extant in choice Latin, directing 

 the sheriffs of London to furnish four-pence a day for " our white 

 bear in our Tower of London, and his keeper," and to provide a 

 muzzle and iron-chain to hold him when out of the water, and a long 

 and strong rope to hold him wheu he is fishing in the Thames. 

 (Madox, ' Exchequer Writs.') 



Fossil Bears. 



The fossil remains of these animals, when first found, ministered, 

 as might have been expected from the spirit of the age, to the specu- 

 lations of the lovers of the marvellous, and figured in the medical 

 prescriptions of the time. The caverns of the neighbourhood of the 

 Harz were ransacked for them ; and their supposed virtue as medicines, 

 under the title of fossil Unicorns' Bones, procured a ready sale. In 

 the 'Protogsea' of Leibnitz, there is a figure of one of these fossil 

 unicorns, the product of an imagination sufficiently lively. 



But it was not till the year 1672, as Cuvier observes, that any 

 notice, truly osteological, appeared on the subject, when Hayn gave 

 some representations of their bones brought from a cave of the 

 Carpathians, as those of dragons ; and, by way of helping the evidence, 

 informed his readers that there were still to be found in Transylvania 

 dragons alive and flying. 



These were the remains of the extinct Bear of the Caves (Ursus 

 tpehzus), an animal which must have been the largest species of the 

 genus. Rosenniuller, in 1794 and 1795, gave the figure of a cranium 

 from Gailenreuth ; and John Hunter, in the ' Philosophical Trans- 

 actions' (1794), described the bones found there ; and the Margrave of 

 Anspach the caves. 



Blumenbach distinguished the skulls found in the caverns as those 

 of two distmct species, and gave them severally the names of Ursiis 

 tpdma and l/rtiu arctoideus, which Cuvier adopted, expressing 

 however his opinion that they were only varieties of the same 

 species. Goldfuss described a species as U. prisms from the same 

 remains. 



The principal caverns in which these remains have been found are 

 those of Scharzfcld and Bauniaun, the latter of which owes its name 

 (Baumann's Hohle) to a wretched miner, who in 1670 lured by the 

 hope of finding ore sought its recesses. There he wandered, alone 

 and in darkness, three days and three nights. At length he found 

 his way out, but in so exhausted a condition, that he only returned 

 to the light of day to die. 



The caverns of the Carpathians supplied the dragons' bones 

 above mentioned. 



In Franeonia, near Muggendorf, the caves are numerous, and abound 

 in bones. Here are the caverns of Gailenreuth, Rabeustein, Kiih- 

 loch, &e. 



The south-west border of the Thuringerwald has those of Gliicks- 

 brunn and Leibenstein, near Meinungeu, and Westphalia those of 

 Kliiterhbhle and Sundwick^ 



In England the remains of Bears have been found in the largest 

 numbers in Kent's Hole, near Torquay. They have also been found 

 in Tertiary deposits at Grays in Essex, Bacton in Norfolk, in the 

 valley of the Severn near Tewkesbury, the Manea Fen in Cambridge- 

 shire, at Newboum in Suffolk, and iu other places. Professor Oweu, in 

 his ' History of British Fossil Mammals,' refers these remains to U. 

 Arctot, U. pi-item, and U. spetteus. He doubts the existence of the 

 fossil species U. arctoideus and U. planits. Dr. Buckland (' Reliquiae 

 Diluvianoe') thus describes the scene in the cavern of Kiihloch : " It 

 is literally true, that in this single cavern (the size and proportions 

 of which are nearly equal to those of the interior of a large church) 

 there are hundreds of cart-loads of black animal dust, entirely 

 covering the whole floor, to a depth which, if we multiply this depth 

 by the length and breadth of the cavern, will be found to exceed 

 5000 cubic feet. The whole of this mass has been again and again 

 dug over in search of teeth and bones, which it still contains 

 abundantly, though in broken fragments. The state of these is very 

 different from that of the bones we find in any of the other caverns, 

 being of a black, or, more properly speaking, dark umber-colour 

 throughout, and many of them readily crumbling under the finger 

 into a soft dark powder, resembling mummy powder, and being of the 

 same nature with the black earth in which they are imbedded. 

 The quantity of animal matter accumulated on this floor is the 

 most surprising and the only thing of the kind I ever witnessed ; 

 and many hundred, I may say thousand, individuals must have 

 contributed their remains to make up this appalling mass of the dust 

 of death. It seems, in great part, to be derived from comminuted 

 and pulverised bone ; for. the fleshy parts of animal bodies produce, 

 by their decomposition, so small a quantity of permanent earthy 

 residuum, that we must seek for the origin of this mass principally 

 in decayed bones. The cave is so dry, that the black earth lies in 

 the state of loose powder, and rises in duat under the feet : it also 

 retains so large a proportion of its original animal matter, that it i 

 occasionally used by the peasants as an enriching manure for the 

 adjacent meadows." The following is added by l)r. Buckland in a 



