intrepid navigator as naturalists ; and the materials which they 

 brought home were well collated together by Pennant, in his 

 ' History of Quadrupeds,' a work of very extraordinary merit 

 considering the date of its publication. England might then 

 fairly be described as taking, as she should do, a lead in scientific 

 Zoology : this period has not been fairly estimated by the modern 

 school of Zoologists, who, at the opening of the Continent after 

 the war, appear to have been so dazzled by the brilliant progress 

 made by the Professors named by Napoleon, that they overlooked 

 the fact that these men were only following in the footsteps of 

 Pennant, Latham, Solander, the Forsters, Fabricius, and others, 

 who were either natives of, or had been fostered by, the scientific 

 men of this country, as Linnaeus followed in the footsteps of Ray. 



Besides the particulars given by Cook and Forster in the ac- 

 count of their voyages, Forster communicated to Buffon the 

 figures of two of the species he had observed, accompanied by 

 details of their organization and habits, which were printed in 

 the supplementary volumes of BufFon's Natural History, and 

 form the most complete and best account we have yet had of the 

 history of these species. 



Peron and Lesueur, in their record of Baudin's Voyage, indi- 

 cated some Seals found in the South Sea, and give fuller details 

 of the Sea-Elephant, they having been so fortunate as to fall in 

 with some males of that species ; but the Natural History of the 

 voyage was never published, so that we are indebted to Cuvier 

 (Oss. Foss.) for the description of the only Seal they brought 

 home, which appears to have been the Fur Seal of commerce. 



In the Zoology of Captain Duperrey's ''Voyage of the Co- 

 quille,' a Seal is figured, under the name of Phoca Molossina ; 

 but the skull and skin, now in the Paris Museum, as Nilsson has 

 correctly observed, is only the young Sea- Lion's. In the ' Voy- 

 age of the Astrolabe ' two other southern Seals are figured ; one 

 called Otaria cinerea, Peron, which appears to be the Fur Seal 

 of commerce, and the Otaria australis, which is very like my 

 Arctocephalus lobatus, described from a skull in Mr. Brookes's 

 collection many years previously. It is to be regretted, that the 

 figures here referred to, especially of the skull, are so bad as to 

 be utterly useless for the determination of the species without 

 comparison of the original specimens. 



In the French ' Voyage to the South Pole,' now in course of 

 publication, figures are given of the Sea-Leopard and the com- 

 mon White Antarctic Seal, which they name Phoca carcino- 

 phaga, the two most common species found everywhere in these 

 regions on the packed ice. 



Mr. W. Hamilton has given an account of the Seals and 

 other marine Mammalia, in Sir W. Jardine's ' Naturalists' Li- 



A2 



