WONDERFUL SEAL ISLANDS. 229 



Siberian coasts far away to the northwest. The dark-brown tufa 

 bluffs and the breccia walls at the east landing of St. Paul Island, 

 known as " Black Bluffs," rise suddenly from the sea sixty to eighty 

 feet, with stratified horizontal lines of light-gray calcareous con- 

 glomerate, or cement, in which are embedded sundry fossils charac- 

 teristic of and belonging to the Tertiary Age, such as Cardium 

 grcenlandicum, C. decoratum, and Astarte pectunculata, etc. This is 

 the only locality within the purview of the Pribylov Islands where 

 any palaentological evidence of their age can be found. These 

 specimens, as indicated, are exceedingly abundant ; I brought 

 down a whole series, gathered there at the east landing or " Nava- 

 stock," in a short half -hour's search and labor. 



Although small quantities of drift-wood lodge at all points of 

 the coast, yet the greatest amount is found on the south shore, and 

 thence around to Garden Cove ; this drift-timber is usually wholly 

 stripped of its bark, principally pine and fir sticks, some of them 

 quite large, eighteen inches or two feet in diameter. Several years 

 occur when a large driftage will be thrown or stranded here ; then 

 long intervals of many seasons will elapse with scarcely a log or 

 stick coming ashore. I found at Garden Cove, in June, 1873, the 

 well-preserved husk of a cocoanut, cast up by the surf on the beach : 

 did I not know that it was most undoubtedly thrown over by some 

 whaler in these waters, not many hundred miles away at the far- 

 thest, I should have indulged in a pretty reverie as to its path in 

 drifting from the South Seas to this lonely islet. I presume, how- 

 ever, that the timber which the sea brings for the Pribylov Islands 

 is that borne down upon the annual floods of the Kuskokvim and 

 Nooshagak Rivers on the mainland, and to the east-northeastward, a 

 trifle more than two hundred and twenty-five miles ; it comes, how- 

 ever, in very scant supply. I saw very little drift-wood on St. Mat- 

 thew Island ; but on the eastern shore of St. Lawrence there was 

 an immense aggregate, which unquestionably came from the Yukon 

 mouth. 



The fact that fur-seals frequent these islands and those of 

 Bering and Copper, on the Russian side, to the exclusion of other 

 land, seems at first odd or singular, to say the least ; but when we 

 come to examine the subject we find that those animals, when they 

 repair hither to rest for two or three months on the land, as they 

 must do by their habit during the breeding-season, require a cool, 

 moist atmosphere, imperatively coupled with firm, well-drained 



