140 ADVENTURES IN THE NORTHERN SEAS. 



Tusks vary very much in size and shape, accord- 

 ing to the age and sex of the animaL A good -pair 

 of bull's tusks may be stated as twenty-four inches 

 long, and four pounds apiece in weight ; but we 

 obtained several pairs above these dimensions, and 

 in particular one pair, which measured thirty-one 

 inches in length when taken out of the head, and 

 weigh eight pounds each. Such a pair of tusks, 

 however, is extremely rare, and I never, to the best 

 of my belief, saw a pair nearly equal to them among 

 more than one thousand walruses, although we took 

 the utmost pains to secure the best, and always in- 

 spected the tusks carefully with the glass before we 

 fired a shot or threw a harpoon. 



Cows' tusks will average fully as long as bulls', 

 from their being less liable to be broken, but they 

 are seldom more than twenty inches long, and three 

 pounds each in weight. They are generally set 

 much closer together than the bull's tusks, some- 

 times even overlapping one another at the points, 

 as is the case with the stuffed specimen in the Brit- 

 ish Museum. The tusks of old bulls, on the con- 

 trary, generally diverge from one another, being 

 sometimes as much as fifteen inches apart at the 

 points. It is a common belief among the hunters 

 that those walruses which have wide-set tusks are 

 the most savage and dangerous, and more particu- 

 larly if the tusks diverge from one another in 

 curves, as is sometimes, though rarely, the case. I 

 can easily conceive that this opinion is well found- 



