258 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



where these hair-seals are the seals of commerce : they are found in 

 such immense numbers between Greenland and Labrador, and 

 thence to the eastward at certain seasons of every year, that em- 

 ployment is given to a fleet of about sixty sailing and steam ves- 

 sels, which annually goes forth from St. John, Newfoundland, and 

 elsewhere, fitted for seal-fishing : taking in all this cruising over 

 three hundred thousand of these animals each season. The princi- 

 pal object of value, however, is the oil rendered from them : the 

 skins have a very small commercial importance. 



The fur-seal, Callorhinus ursinus, which repairs to these islands 

 to breed and to shed its hair and fur, in numbers that seem almost 

 fabulous, is the highest organized of all the Pinnipedia, and, indeed, 

 for that matter, when land and water are weighed in the account 

 together, there is no other animal known to man which may be truly 

 classed as its superior, from a purely physical point of view. 

 Certainly there are few, if any, creatures in the animal kingdom 

 that can be said to exhibit a higher order of instinct, approaching 

 even our intelligence. 



I wish to draw attention to a specimen of the finest of this race 

 a male in the flush and prime of his first maturity, six or seven 

 years old, and full grown. When it comes up from the sea early 

 in the spring, out to its station for the breeding season, we have an 

 animal before us that will measure six and a half to seven and a 

 quarter feet in length from tip of nose to the end of its abbreviated 

 abortive tail. It will weigh at least four hundred pounds, and I 

 have seen older specimens much more corpulent, which, in my best 

 judgment, could not be less than six hundred pounds in weight.* 



* Those extremely heavy adult males which arrive first in the season and 

 take their stations on the rookeries, are so fat that they do not exhibit a 

 wrinkle or a fold of the skins enveloping their blubber-lined bodies. Most of 

 this fatty deposit is found around the shoulders and the neck, though a warm 

 coat of blubber covers all the other portions of the body save the flippers. This 

 blubber-thickening of the neck and chest is characteristic of the adult males 

 only, which are, by its provisions, enabled to sustain the extraordinary pro- 

 tracted fasting periods incident to their habit of life and reproduction. 



When those superlatively fleshy bulls first arrive, a curious body-tremor 

 seems to attend every movement which the animals make on land ; their fat 

 appears to ripple backward and forward under their hides, like waves. As 

 they alternate with their flippers in walking, the whole form of the " see- 

 catchie " fairly shakes as a bowl full of jelly does when agitated on the table 

 before us. 



