304 



OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



the seal's mustache is denied to him until he has attained his sev- 

 enth or eighth year. 



The male does not get his full growth and weight until the 

 close of his seventh year, but realizes most of it, osteologically 

 speaking, by the end of the fifth ; and from this it may be perhaps 

 truly inferred that the male seals live to an average age of eighteen 

 or twenty years, if undisturbed in a normal condition, and that the 

 females exist ten or twelve seasons under the same favorable cir- 

 cumstances. Their respective weights, when fully mature and fat, 

 in the spring, will, in regard to the male, strike an average of from 

 four to five hundred pounds, while the females will show a mean of 

 from seventy to eighty pounds. 



The female does not gain a maximum size and weight until the 

 end of her fourth year, so far as I have observed, but she does most 

 of her longitudinal growing in the first two. After she has passed 

 her fourth and fifth years, she weighs from thirty to fifty pounds 

 more than she did in the days of her youthful maternity.* In the 



* I did not permit myself to fall into error by estimating this matter of 

 weight, because I early found that the apparent huge bulk of a sea-lion bull or 

 fur-seal male, when placed upon the scales, shrank far below my notions : I took 

 a great deal of pains, on several occasions, during the killing-season, to have a 

 platform scale carted out into the field, and as the seals were knocked down, 

 and before they were bled, I had them carefully weighed, constructing the fol- 

 lowing table from my observations : 



