UNDER GENIAL SKIES 



heads and shoulders seem to show above the 

 water, and they appear to be having a happy 

 time. 



! Now and then one may be seen swimming about 

 or lifted up in a wall of green-blue transparent 

 water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in 

 the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them 

 children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking, 

 and then I think of them as dogs or hounds of the 

 sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night 

 when it has a half -muffled, smothered sound. 



They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, 

 and there seems something incongruous in their 

 being at home there in the cold briny deep 

 badgers or marmots that burrow in the waves, 

 wolves or coyotes that hunt their prey in the sea. 



Their progenitors were once land animals, but 

 Darwinism does not tell us what they were. The 

 whale also was once a land animal, but the testi- 

 mony of the rocks throws no light upon its ante- 

 cedents. The origin of any new species is shrouded 

 in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and 

 the short span of human life, or of the whole 

 human history, gives us no adequate vantage- 

 ground from which to solve the problem. 



I can easily believe that these hair seals are close 

 akin to the dog. They have five digits; they bolt 

 their food like dogs; their sense of smell is said to 

 be very acute, though how it could serve them in 



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