MORSE AND MAHLEMOOT. 445 



pen and brush in noting and portraying such extraordinary brutes, 

 as they lay grunting and bellowing, unconscious of my presence, 

 and not ten feet away from the ledge upon which I sat* 



Sitting as I did to the leeward of them, with a strong wind blow- 

 ing in at the time from seaward, which, ever and anon, fairly covered 

 many of them with foaming surf-spray, therefore they took no notice 

 of me during the three or more hours of my study. I was first aston- 

 ished at observing the raw, naked appearance of the hide : it was 

 a skin covered with multitudes of pustular-looking warts and large 

 boils or pimples, without hair or fur, save scattered and almost invisi- 

 ble hairs ; it was wrinkled in deep, flabby seam-folds, and marked by 

 dark-red venous lines, which showed out in strong contrast through 

 the thicker and thinner yellowish-brown cuticle, that in turn seemed 

 to be scaling off in places as if with leprosy ; indeed, a fair expres- 

 sion of this walrus-hide complexion if I may use the term, can be 

 understood by the inspection of those human countenances in the 

 streets and on the highways of our cities which are designated as 

 the faces of "bloats." The forms of Rosmarus struck my eye at 

 first in a most unpleasant manner, and the longer I looked at them 

 the more heightened was my disgust ; for they resembled distorted, 

 mortified, shapeless masses of flesh ; those clusters of big, swollen, 

 watery pimples, which were of a yellow, parboiled flesh-color, and 



* These favored basaltic tables are also commented upon in similar connec- 

 tion by an old writer in 1775, Shuldham, who calls them " echouries ;" he is 

 describing the Atlantic walrus as it appears at the Magdalen Islands: "The 

 echouries are formed principally by nature, being a gradual slope of soft rock, 

 with which the Magdalen Islands abound, about eighty to one hundred yards 

 wide at the water-side, and spreading so as to contain, near the summit, a very 

 considerable number." The tables at Walrus Island and those at Southwest 

 Point are very much less in area than those described by Shuldham, and are 

 a small series of low, saw-tooth jetties of the harder basalt, washed in relief, 

 from a tufa matrix ; there is no room to the landward of them for many wal- 

 ruses to lie upon. The Odob&nus does not like to haul up on loose or shingly 

 shores, because it has the greatest difficulty in getting a solid hold for its fore 

 flippers with which to pry up and move ahead its huge, clumsy body. When it 

 hauls on a sand beach, it never attempts to crawl out to the dry region back of 

 the surf, but lies just awash, at high water. In this fashion they used to rest 

 all along the sand-reaches of St. Paul prior to the Russian advent in 1786-87 , 

 and when Shuldham was inditing his letters on the habits of Rosmarus, Odo- 

 bcenus was then lying out in full force and great physical peace on the Priby- 

 lov Islands. 



