Elephant Seals of Guadalupe Island 



island. Then its numbers swarmed on coast and 

 islands alike; now it survives only on an isolated 

 beach. Unfortunately for its increase, the elephant 

 seal yields a valuable oil, and about the time when 

 California was being settled it was killed in such 

 numbers that in the year 1869 it was reported by 

 its only biographer as "nearly, if not quite, 

 extinct." 



Naturalists heard nothing of it for many years, 

 and believed it lost to science as well as to com- 

 merce, a loss that they felt all the more deeply as 

 little was known of its ways and appearance, and 

 with one or two exceptions, museums were without 

 specimens. It had never been photographed, and 

 the few drawings in existence were crude and un- 

 satisfactory. But the race was not quite extinct, 

 and it has lately been my good fortune to discover 

 the only herd now known to exist in the Pacific. 



In 1884, while making natural history collec- 

 tions for the National Museum in California, I 

 learned from a seal hunter of the continued ex- 

 istence of this seal in Lower California, and at once 

 communicated the fact to the secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, who asked me by tele- 

 graph to charter a schooner for a cruise among the 

 uninhabited shores and islands where it was said 

 to linger. The search lasted three months, and 



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