738 CYSTOPHORA CRISTATA HOODED SEAL. 



GENERAL HISTORY AND NOMENCLATURE. The first refer- 

 ences to the Hooded Seal, or at least the earliest that have any 

 importance in relation to the technical history of the species, 

 are the brief allusions to it made by Egede in 1741, by Ellis in 

 1748, and by Cranz in 1765, the first two of whom gave each, in 

 addition to their textual notices, a grotesquely rude figure of 

 the animal, although they show clearly that no other species 

 than the present could have been intended. On these refer- 

 ences and figures are based Pennant's " Hooded Seal," and 

 Schreber's "Klappmiize". Primarily they are the basis also 

 of Erxleben's Phoca cristata (1777), the first tenable specific 

 designation of the species. Eleven years earlier (1766), how- 

 ever, Fabricius had called the species Phoca leonina, apparently 

 confounding it with the Phoca leonina of Linn6, 1758, which 

 has reference entirely to the Sea Elephant of the southern seas. 

 In 1766 Linne" also partly confounded the two species by cit- 

 ing as synonyms of his Phoca leonina the Klapmuts of Egede, 

 Ellis's " Seal with a Cawl," etc. Although Fabricius retained 

 for this species the name Phoca leonina, in his "Fauna Groen- 

 landiea," published in 1780, he abandoned it in 1791 for Phoca 

 cristata, but at the same time kept up the confusion of this spe- 

 cies with the southern Sea Elephant by citing the references 

 to that species as synonyms. With slight exceptions, the name 

 cristata has since prevailed as the designation of the species, 

 although Boddaert renamed it cucullata in 1785, and Nilsson 

 in 1820 applied to it the name borealis. Milbert labelled a speci- 

 men he sent from New York to the Paris Museum Phoca mi- 

 trata, which name was published by G. Cuvier in 1825, and sub- 

 sequently came into some prominence, through the labors of 

 compilers, as that of a supposed second species of Crested 

 Seal. Thienemaim, in 1824, described the young under the 

 name leucopla, and Lesson, in 1843, added isidorei, based, as 

 already noticed, on a specimen captured on the coast of France. 



The chief stumbling-block in the technical history of this 

 species has been Cuvier's Phoca mitrata. To show how im- 

 perfectly the Hooded or Crested Seal was known by a promi- 

 nent writer on the Pinnipeds as late as 1839, and also to indi- 

 cate the confusion that arose from the Phoca mitrata, I quote 

 a few passages from Dr. Eobert Hamilton's "Amphibious Car- 

 nivora"(pp. 197, 204-206). He begins by saying that "It is 

 with considerable hesitation we place the Crested Seal in the 

 same genus with the Mitrata". He correctly gives for a " Plate 



