AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 283 



beyond this boundary, then I can go up to them and carry them off 

 before the eye of the old Turk without receiving from him the 

 slightest attention in their behalf a curious guardian, forsooth ! 



It is surprising to me how few of these young pups get crushed 

 to death while the ponderous bulls are floundering over them, en- 

 gaged in fighting and quarrelling among themselves. I have seen 

 two bulls dash at each other with all the energy of furious rage, 

 meeting right in the midst of a small " pod " of forty or fifty pups, 

 tramp over them with all their crushing weight, and bowling them 

 out right and left in every direction by the impetus of their move- 

 ments, without injuring a single one, as far as I could see. Still, 

 when we come to consider the fact that, despite the great weight of 

 the old males, their broad, flat flippers and yielding bodies may 

 press down heavily on these little fellows without actually breaking 

 bones or mashing them out of shape, it does seem questionable 

 whether more than one per cent, of all the pups born each season 

 on these great rookeries of the Pribylov Islands are destroyed in 

 this manner on the breeding grounds.* 



The vitality of a fur-seal is simply astonishing. Its physical 

 organization passes beyond the fabled nine lives of the cat. As a 

 slight illustration of its tenure of life, I will mention the fact that 

 one morning Philip came to me with a pup in his arms, which 

 had just been born and was still womb-moist, saying that the 

 mother had been killed at Tolstoi by accident, and he supposed 

 that I would like to have a " choochil." I took it up into my labo- 

 ratory, and, finding that it could walk about and make a great noise, 

 I attempted to feed it, with the idea of having a comfortable sub- 

 ject to my pencil for life-study of the young in varied attitudes 

 of sleep and motion. It refused everything that I could summon 

 to its attention as food, and, alternately sleeping and walking in its 

 clumsy fashion about the floor ; it actually lived nine days, spending 

 the half of * every one in floundering over the floor, accompanying 

 all movements with a persistent, hoarse, blaating cry, and I do not 

 believe it ever had a single drop of its mother's milk. 



In a pup the head is the only disproportionate feature at birth 



* The only danger which these little fellows are subject to up here is being 

 caught by an October gale down at the surf-margin, when they have not 

 fairly learned to swim. Large numbers have been destroyed by sudden " nips " 

 of this character. 



