AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 325 



given above it will be seen that 1,000,000 pups or young seals, in 

 round numbers, are born upon these islands of the Pribylov group 

 every year. Of this million, one-half are males. These 500,000 

 young males, before they leave the islands for sea during October 

 and November, and when they are between five or six months old, 

 fat, and hardy, have suffered but a trifling loss in numbers say one 

 per cent. while on and about the islands of their birth, surrounding 

 which and upon which they have no enemies whatever to speak of ; 

 but after they get well down to the Pacific, spread out over an im- 

 mense area of watery highways in quest of piscatorial food, they form 

 the most helpless of their kind to resist or elude the murderous 

 teeth and carnivorous attacks of basking sharks * and killer-whales, f 



fatal epidemic among seals. It is not reasonable to suppose that the Priby- 

 lov rookeries have never suffered from distempers in the past, or are not to in 

 the future, simply because no occasion seems to have arisen during the com- 

 paratively brief period of their human domination. 



* Somniows microceplialus. Some of these sharks are of very large size, 

 and when caught by the Indians of the northwest coast, basking or asleep on 

 the surface of the sea, they will, if transfixed by the natives' harpoons, take 

 a whole fleet of canoes in tow and run swiftly with them several hours before 

 exhaustion enables the savages to finally despatch them. A Hudson Bay 

 trader, William Manson (at Fort Alexander in 1865), told me that his father 

 had killed one in the smooth waters of Millbank Sound which measured 

 twenty-four feet in length, and its liver alone yielded thirty-six gallons of oil. 

 The Somniosus lies motionless for long intervals in calm waters of the North 

 Pacific, just under and at the surface, with its dorsal fin clearly exposed above. 

 What havoc such a carnivorous fish would be likely to effect in a "pod" of 

 young fur-seals can be better imagined than described. 



f Orca gladiator. While revolving this particular line of inquiry in my 

 mind when on the ground and among the seals, I involuntarily looked con- 

 stantly for some sign of disturbance in the sea which would indicate the pres- 

 ence of an enemy, and, save seeing a few examples of the Orca, I never de- 

 tected anything. If the killer- whale was common here, it would be patent to 

 the most casual eye, because it is the habit of this ferocious cetacean to swim 

 so closely at the surface as to show its peculiar sharp dorsal fin high above the 

 water. Possibly a very superficial observer could and would confound that 

 long trenchant fluke of the Orca with the stubby node upon the spine of a 

 humpback whale, which that animal exhibits only when it is about to dive. 

 Humpbacks feed around the islands, but not commonly ; they are the excep- 

 tion. They do not, however, molest the seals in any manner whatever, and 

 little squads of these pinnipeds seem to delight themselves by swimming in 

 endless circles around and under the huge bodies of those whales, frequently 

 leaping out and entirely over the cetacean's back, as witnessed on one occasion 

 by myself and the crew of the Reliance off the coast of Kadiak, June, 1874. 



