84 NATURAL HISTORY OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 



with all animals, is preyed upon by vermin, and it has a peculiar species of louse, or parasitic tick, 

 that belongs to it. 



SLEEPING AFLOAT. Speaking of the Seal as it rests in the water, leads me to remark that 

 they seem to sleep as sound and as comfortably, bedded on the waves or rolled by the swell, as i hex- 

 do on the land ; they lie on their backs, fold the fore-flippers across the chest, and turn the hind 

 ones up and over, so that the tips rest on their necks and chins, thus exposing simply the nose 

 and the heels of the hind-flippers above water, nothing else being seen. In this position, unless it 

 is very rough, the Seal sleeps as serenely as did the prototype of that, memorable song, who was 

 "rocked in the cradle of the deep." 



FASTING OF TUP, SEALS AT THE ROOKERIES: INTESTINAL WORMS. All the bulls, from the 

 very tirst, that have been able to hold their positions, have not left them from the moment of their 

 landing for a single instant, night or day; nor will they do so until the end of the rutting season, 

 which subsides entirely betxveen the 1st and 10th of August, beginning shortly after the coming 

 of the cows in Juue. Of necessity, therefore, this causes them to fast, to abstain entirely from food 

 of any kind, or xvater, for three months at least; and a few of them actually stay out four mouths, iu 

 total abstinence, before going back into the water for the first time after "hauling up" in May; 

 they then return as so many bony shadows of what they were only a few mouths anteriorly; 

 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 hibernating bears iu caves; there 

 is not one torpid breath drawn by them in the whole period of their fast; it is evidently sustained 

 and accomplished by the self-absorption of their own fat, with which they are so liberally supplied 

 when they tirst 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, 

 marks 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 during the same time, which, however, in spite of the violation of a supposed physiological 

 law, does not seem to aflect them, for they come back just as sleek, fat, and ambitious as ever, in 

 the following season. 



I have examined the stomachs of hundreds which were driven up and killed immediately after 

 their arrival in the spring, near the village; I have the word of the natives here, who have seen 

 hundreds of thousands of them opened during the slaughtering seasons past, but in no single case 

 has anything ever been found, other than the bile and ordinary secretions of healthy organs of 

 this class, with the marked exception of finding iu every one a snarl or cluster of worms, 1 from the 

 ize of a walnut to a bunch as large as a man's fist. Fasting apparently has no effect upon the 

 worms, for on the rare occasion, and perhaps the last one that will ever occur, of killing three or 

 four hundred old bulls late in the fall to supply the natives with canoe skins, I was present, and 

 again examined their paunches, finding the same worms within. The worms were lively in these 

 empty stomachs, and their presence. I think, gives some reason for the habit which the old bulls 

 have (the others do not) of swallowing small water- worn bowlders, the stones in some of the 

 stomachs weighing half a pound apiece, in others much smaller. In one paunch I found over five 



l Nematoda. 



