HABITS AND THE CHASE. 107 



Peters. Dr. Murie, in 1874, gave numerous figures illustrative 

 of its external characters, myology, dentition, generative, di- 

 gestive, and vocal organs, based on a dissection of the young 

 Walrus that died in the Garden of the Zoological Society of Lon- 

 don in 1867, these being the only figures, so far as known to me, 

 devoted to the general anatomy. Doubtless other figures of the 

 skull, and possibly of the dentition, have appeared that are not 

 here noted. 



HABITS AND THE CHASE. The Walruses are at all tunes more 

 or less gregarious, occurring generally in large or small compa- 

 nies, according to their abundance. Like the Seals, they are 

 restricted in their wanderings to the neighborhood of shores or 

 large masses of floating ice, being rarely seen far out in the open 

 sea. Although moving from one portion of their feeding-grounds 

 to another, they are said to be in no true sense a migratory ani- 

 mal.* They delight in huddling together on the ice-floes or on 

 shore, to which places they resort to bask in the sun, pressing one 

 against another like so many swine. They are also said to repair 

 in large herds to favorable shores or islands,! usually in May 

 and June, to give birth to their young, at which times they some- 

 times remain constantly on land for two weeks together, with- 

 out ever taking food, f They are believed to be monogamous^ 

 and to bring forth usually but a single young at a time, and 

 never more than two. The period of gestation is commonly be- 

 lieved to be about nine months. The young are born from April 

 to June, the time probably varying with the latitude. Malm- 

 gren states that the pairing of the Walruses takes place about 

 the end of May or the beginning of June ; that the female gives 

 birth to a single young in May or June ; and that the period of 

 pregnancy lasts probably for a year. He states that Dr. A. von 

 Goes found a month-old foetus in the uterus of a female on the 

 8th of July, in latitude 80 N"., but adds that females with ma- 

 ture young in the uterus have been taken as late as the end of 



* See Brown, Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1868, p. 433. 



t Says Zorgdrager (writing in 1750), as quoted by Buffon, in referring to 

 this habit : " Auciennement & avant d'avoir e"t6 perse" elite's, les morses s'avan- 

 coient fort avant dans les terres, de sorte que dans les hautes marges ils 

 <toient assez loin de Peau, & que dans le temps de la basse mer, la distance 

 6tant encore beaucoup plus grande, on le abordoit ais&neiit." Hist. Nat., 

 tome xiii, p. 306. 



$ See Slmldhain, Phil. Trans., vol. Ivi, 1777, p. 249, quoted anted, p. 67. 



