AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 259 



The head of this animal now before us appears to be disproportion- 

 ately small in comparison with an immensely thick neck and shoul- 

 ders ; but, as we come to examine it, we will find it is mostly all 

 occupied by the brain. The light frame- work of its skull supports 

 an expressive pair of large bluish-hazel eyes, alternately burning 

 with revengeful, passionate light, then suddenly changing to the 

 tones of tenderness and good-nature. It has a muzzle and jaws of 

 about the same size and form observed in any full-blooded New- 

 foundland dog, with this difference, that the lips are not flabby and 

 overhanging ; they are as firmly lined and pressed against one an- 

 other as our own. The upper lips support a yellowish-white and 

 gray mustache, composed of long, stiff bristles, which, when not 

 torn out and broken off in combat, sweeps down and over the 

 shoulders as a luxuriant plume. Look at it as it comes leisurely 

 swimming on toward the land ; see how high above the water it 

 carries its head, and how deliberately it surveys the beach, after 

 having stepped upon it (for it may be truly said to step with its 

 fore-flippers, as they regularly alternate when it moves up), carry- 

 ing the head well above them, erect and graceful, at least three feet 

 from the ground. The fore-feet, or flippers, are a pair of dark 

 bluish-black hands, about eight or ten inches broad at their junc- 

 tion with the body, and the metacarpal joint, running out to 

 an ovate point at their extremity, some fifteen to eighteen inches 

 from this union all the rest of the forearm, the ulna, radius, and 

 humerus being concealed under the skin and thick blubber-folds of 

 the main body and neck, hidden entirely at this season, when it is 

 so fat. But six weeks to three months after this time of landing, 

 when that superfluous fat and flesh is consumed by self-absorption, 

 then those bones will show plainly under its shrunken skin. On 

 the upper side of these flippers the hair of the body straggles down 

 finer and fainter as it comes below to a point close by, and slightly 

 beyond that spot of junction where the phalanges and the meta- 

 carpal bones unite, similar to that point on our own hand where 

 our knuckles are placed ; and here the hair ends, leaving the rest 

 of the skin to the end of the flipper bare and wrinkled in places at 

 the margin of the inner side ; showing, also, five small pits, con- 

 taining abortive nails, which are situated immediately over the 

 union of the phalanges with their cartilaginous continuations to the 

 end of the flipper. 



On the under side of the flipper the skin is entirely bare from 



