Miscellaneous. 65 



the species to which a seal called the " ground seal " (probably a 

 corruption of " r/roivn seal") belongs, and hazarded an opinion that 

 it might only be PJioca harhata, 0. Fab. Since that paper was pub- 

 lished, through the kindness of Mr. Charles E. Smith, the surgeon of 

 Mr. Lament's yachi expedition to Spitzbergen in 1869, I have ob- 

 tained skulls which leave no doubt of the soundness of that opinion. 

 Phoca hnrhata must therefore be classed as an oceanic seal, and one of 

 the species slaughtered by the sealers. Halkhoerus griiphus, 0. Fab., 

 I find to be a very common seal in the Hebrides. It is born yellowish 

 white, but begins to get dark on the snout and flippers a day or two 

 after birth. So abundant is this species of seal in the Hebrides that 

 a friend of mine, Capt. M'Donald, R.N., in one voyage of a few 

 weeks in one of the fishery cutters, killed seventy. The same gen- 

 tleman in April 1841 killed a walrus (Trichechus 7-osmarus, Linn.) 

 on the East Heiskar, which adds one more to the recorded instances 

 of this animal's occurrence on the British coasts. 



You may remember also that, in a paper on the Greenland mam- 

 mals, in the same work (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1868, p. 359), I expressed 

 an opinion that the animal which the Greenlanders talk about under 

 the name of " Amarok " was not, as Fabricius supposed, the Gulo 

 borealis, Eetz., but only the Greenland dog run wild and returned 

 to its pristine condition of the wolf. At that time, however, no 

 specimen of this much-talked-about animal had ever been killed ; 

 but the winter after we left the country (1868-69), a commu- 

 nication which I had recently from Greenland informs me that a 

 real wolf (apparently C. occidentalis var. grlseo-aIbus)had been killed 

 at Godhavn in about 69° 14' IS". A whaling captain whom I met latt 

 autumn (1869) in Copenhagen had himself seen the skin, and says 

 that it is identical with the wolf found on the opposite shore of Davis 

 Strait. This wolf is quite abundant there, and so troublesome to 

 the natives, that I was informed, when on that coast in 1861, that 

 the natives had been compelled to remove their villages from some 

 quarters where it was very abundant, on account of its destroying 

 their dogs. The wolf killed at Disco Island (Godhavn) in the winter 

 of 1868-69 had probably crossed Davis Strait on the ice ; for the 

 winter was a severe one, and the Eskimo about Pond's Bay (on the 

 opposite shore) declared that wolves had that winter been very 

 abundant thereabout. The same very intelligent whaling captain 

 (a man whom I have known many years) reminded me of a fact 

 (which he recalled to my recollection) that I omitted to mention in 

 my papers on the arctic mammalian fauna (which, curiously enough, 

 he had read in Godhavn, in Greenland), viz. that not unfrequently 

 the arctic fox (Vidpes larjopus, Linn.), is seen, four or five hundred 

 miles from the nearest land, feeding on the carcases of seals killed 

 by the sealers on the great floes, between Jan Mayen Island and 

 Spitzbergen, in the spring of the year — a habit whith it shares with 

 its much more maritime cousin the white bear (Thalarctos marl- 

 timus, Linn.). Though this plantigrade passes much of its time in the 

 water, yet I need scarcely say that the author of an extraordinary 

 Ajvi. & Maff.N.IIist. Scr. 4. VoI.\u. 5 



