AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 273 



bony shadows of what they were only a few months previously ; 

 covered with wounds, abject and spiritless, they laboriously crawl 

 back to the sea to renew a fresh lease of life. 



Such physical endurance is remarkable enough alone ; but it is 

 simply wonderful when we come to associate this fasting with the 

 unceasing activity, restlessness, and duty devolved upon the bulls 

 as the heads of large families. They do not stagnate like hibernat- 

 ing bears in caves ; there is not one torpid breath drawn by them 

 in the whole period of their fast. It is evidently sustained and accom- 

 plished by the self-absorption of their own fat, with which they are 

 so liberally supplied when they first come out from the sea and take 

 up their positions on the breeding grounds, and which gradually 

 disappears, until nothing but the staring hide, protruding tendons 

 and bones mark the limit of their abstinence. There must be some 

 remarkable provision made by nature for the entire torpidity of the 

 seals' stomachs and bowels, in consequence of their being empty 

 and unsupplied during this long period, coupled with the intense 

 activity and physical energy of the animals throughout that time, 

 which, however, in spite of the violation of a supposed physiological 

 law, does not seem to affect them, for they come back just as sleek, 

 fat, and ambitious as ever, in the following season. That the seals 

 drink or need fresh water, I doubt ; but they cool their mouths in- 

 cessantly by swimming with them wide open through the waves, 

 laving as it were their hot throats and lips in the flood.* 



Between June 12th and 14th, the first of the cow-seals, as a 

 rule, come up from the sea ; then that long agony of the waiting 

 bulls is over, and they signalize it by a period of universal, spas- 

 modic, desperate fighting among themselves. Though they have 

 quarrelled all the time from the moment they first landed, and con- 



* " Do these seals drink ? " is a question doubtless often uppermost and 

 suggested to the observer's eye, as he watches those animals going to the water 

 from the hauling-grounds and the rookeries ; at least it was in mine. I never 

 could detect a caUorhinus or a eumetopias lapping, either in the fresh-water pools 

 and lakes, or in the brackish lagoon, or the sea ; but it plunges at times into 

 the rollers with its jaws wide open as it dives, reappearing quickly in the same 

 manner to dip and rise again, many times in rapid succession, as it swims 

 along, the water running in little streams from the corners of the open mouth 

 whenever iU head pops above the surface. Whether this action was simply 

 to cool itself, or that of drinking, I am not prepared to assert positively. I 

 think it was to meet both purposes. 

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