AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. 



315 



and to wliicli I made refereBce in a previous section of this chapter. 

 Gazing at these myriads of "bachelor-seals" spread out in their 

 restless hundreds and hundreds of thousands vipon this ground, 

 one feels the utter impotency of verbal description, and reluctantly 

 shuts his note and sketch books to view it with renewed fascination 

 and perfect helplessness. 



Looking from the village across the cove and down upon the 

 lagoon, still another strange contradiction appears — at least it 

 seems a natural contradiction to one's usual ideas. Here we see 



\ Salt % o 

 House "_ ^ 



... LAGOON EOOKERY 



SCALE OF FEET 



250 50O 



"^ 1- -^ %i^ ^»\ ^ vat Houses 



Survey Showing the Close Contact of Village. Slaughter-Field and Breeding Grounds. 



the Lagoon rookery, a reach of ground uj)on which some twenty- 

 five or thirty thousand breeding-seals come out regularly every 

 year during the appointed time, and go through their whole elabo- 

 rate system of reproduction, without showing the slightest concern 

 for or attention to the scene directly east of them and across that 

 shallow slough not eighty feet in width. There are the great 

 slaughtering fields of St. Paul Island ; there are the sand-flats 

 where every seal has been slaughtered for years upon years back, 

 for its skin ; and even as we take this note, forty men are standing 



