336 CALLORHINUS URSINUS NORTHERN FUR SEAL. 



at Behring's Island, where he spent some time among them, and 

 carefully studied their habits and anatomy, a detailed account of 

 which appeared in his celebrated memoir entitled " De Bestiis 

 Marinis," in the Transactions of the St. Petersburg Academy 

 for the year 1749.* This important essay was the source of 

 nearly all of the accounts of this animal that appeared prior to 

 the beginning of the present decade. The twenty-eight quarto 

 pages of Steller's memoir devoted to this species, gave not only 

 a detailed account of its anatomy, with an extensive table of 

 measurements, but also of its remarkable habits, and figures of 

 the animals themselves. A little later Krascheninikow, in his 

 History of Kamtschatka,t under the name " Sea Cat," gave also 

 a long account of its habits, apparently based mainly on Stel- 

 ler's notes,| but it embraces a few particulars not given in "De- 

 Bestiis Marinis." Steller's description of the habits of this 

 animal has been largely quoted by Buffon, Pennant, Schreber^ 

 Hamilton, and other general writers. 



Buffon, Pennant, Schreber, Gnaelin, and nearly all writers on 

 the Pinnipeds, down to about 1820, confounded the Northern 

 Fur Seal with the Fur Seals of the Southern hemisphere, blend- 

 ing their history as that of a single species. Peron, in 1816, first 

 recognized it as distinct from its southern allies, and it was so- 

 treated somewhat later by Demarest, Lesson, Fischer, Gray, and 

 other systematic writers, but its distinctive characters were not 



*Nov. Comm. Acad. Petrop., ii, pp. 331-359, pi. xv, 1751. This, as is well 

 known, is a posthumous paper, published six years 'after Steller's death, 

 Steller dying of fever November 12, 1745, while on his way from Siberia to- 

 St. Petersburg. The description of the Sea Bear was written at Behring's. 

 Island irf May, 1742. 



| Hist. Kamtchatka (English edition), translated from the Russian by 

 James Grieve, pp. 123-130, 1764. 



t Krascheninikow, it is stated, "received all of Mr. Steller's papers," to 

 aid him in the preparation of his " History of Kamtschatka." 



$ Nilsson and Mtiller in 1841, and Wagner in 1846 and 1849, on the other 

 hand, still considered all the Sea Bears as belonging to a single species. 

 Wagner, in 1849 (Arch, fur Naturg., 1849, pp. 37-49), described the osteo- 

 logical characters of the Northern species from three skeletons in the 

 Munich Museum received from Behring's Sea. One of these was apparently 

 that of a full-grown female ; a second was believed to be that of a half-grown 

 male, while the third belonged to a very young animal, in which the per- 

 manent teeth were still not wholly developed. Wagner compares the species 

 with Steller's Sea Lion, and with the figures of the skulls of the Southern 

 Sea Bears given by F. Cuvier, Blainville, and Quoy and Gairuard, and notes- 

 various differences in the form of the teeth and skull, but believes that these- 

 differences must be regarded as merely variations dependent upon age. 



