FUE-SEAL HEED OF ALASKA. 29 



when he landed on the Pribilof Islands for the first time in his life, July 8, 1896, saw 

 nothing but a ghostly remnant of the life I was observing and studying" in 1872-1874; 

 the few seals that have in declining generations survived and were wandering about 

 over the edges of those immense areas of deserted hauling grounds of 1872, and had 

 ranged themselves in widely scattered and irregularly massed harems on fringes of 

 the abandoned rookery slopes of 1872, became to his inexperienced eye "a great many 

 thousands" and "a strong nucleus." Never having seen what Isaw, he became 

 deeply impressed with the form of what only aroused my pity in 1890, as it had stimu- 

 lated my wonder and admiration in 1872-1874. With this wretched understanding 

 and loaded to the gunwale with it, Jordan says in regard to my basic proportions as 

 above cited : 



"One who is familiar with the nature of the breeding grounds can not help feeling 

 that in the foundation of this law Mr. Elliott did not have the picture of the rookeries 

 before him. Had he traveled over the length and breadth of the rookeries, as was 

 done in 1896 and 1897, he never would have proposed such a law; that there should be 

 as many seals to the square rod on the jagged and broken lava rocks of Kitovi or on 

 the broken slopes of Gorbatch, where the animals are now, and must have then been 

 separated by bowlders weighing tons, should be the same as on the smooth sand flat 

 of Tolstoi or the level slope of Hutchinson Hill is, on the face of it, impossible." 



Just because I had traveled over these rookeries day in and day out, when seals were 

 there and when absent, was why I recognized this law of distribution, and I will safely 

 venture to say that I have taken two steps to Jordan's one in this work on the rookery 

 grounds; with every fissure and imbedded lava rock (these loose "bowlders weighing 

 tons" on Kitovi and only few such "bowlders" on Gorbatch), I am familiar, and I 

 found to my surprise, at first, that Kitovi was an ideal massing ground for the breeding 

 seals, and Gorbatch also; that these jagged rocks nearly all deeply imbedded in the 

 detritus of the cinder and lava slopes, carried more seals than if they were perfect 

 plane surfaces. \Mierever I found a miniature lava butte on these breeding grounds 

 (they are all of volcanic superstructure) that the seals could not scale or otherwise 

 occupy, the area of the same was deducted from the sum of square feet belonging to 

 the ground, and I never made the "blunder of assuming the same distribution every- 

 where," by taking this precaution, and in the following way: First, I carefully located 

 the herds as they lay on the several breeding grounds during the height of the season, 

 i. e., between July 10 and 20, which I discovered to be the time in 1872, this location 

 was rapidly and accurately made on a land chart of the rookery ground prepared early 

 in the season and before the seals had hauled out. By having these charts all ready, 

 with the stations from which my base lines and angles were taken, all plainly in my 

 Adew when the seals hauled out, it was a simple thing to place the bearmgs of the 

 massed herds on the chart; the reef and Gorbatch grounds made a busy day's work, 

 and no more for me, because thus prepared; the same of Zapadnie. Tolstoi easily 

 finished in half a day; same of Lukannon, same of Kitovi, Polavina a short day's 

 work, while Novastoshals, or the large Northeast Point breeding ground, took the 

 best part of two days. The St. George rookeries were handled in even shorter time 

 by this method. 



Not content with assuming that I had not traveled over the rookeries as he had, 

 Jordan proceeds to ignore the written record of my work in regard to counting the pups. 

 On page 79 of his report he makes the gratuitous assertion that I did not know that 

 all the breeding seals were not present on the rookeries at any one time during the 

 height of the season. Mark his language, which my published work in 1880 disproves 

 every word of: "But of these things, Mr. Elliott was not aware. He was content to 

 assume that all the cows were there." 



What do I say about these cows, published 16 years before Jordan ever saw a cow 

 seal and then for the first time on the Pribilof rookeries? "The females appear to 

 go and to come from the water to feed and bathe quite frequently after bearing their 

 young, and usually return to the spot or its immediate neighborhood, where they 

 leave their pups." * * * Again I say, "A mother comes up from the sea, whither 

 she has been to wash and, perhaps, to feed for the last day or two." * * * (Mono- 

 graph, Seal Islands of Alaska, p. 39; Washington, 1880.) And still worse for Dr. 

 Jordan, on pages 104 and 105 of the same monograph. Fish Commission edition, 1882, 

 appears the stiU more explicit proof of his deliberate inability to give credit to truth. 

 What better impalement of Jordan can be devised than these words of mine: "The 

 umbilicus of the pup rapidly sloughs off, and the little fellow grows apace, nursing 

 to-day heartily, in order that he may perhaps go the next two, three, or four days 

 without another drop from the maternal fount; for it is the habit of the mother seal 

 to regularly and frequently leave her young on this, the spot of its birth, to repair for 

 food in the sea. She is absent by these excursions, on account of the fish not coming 

 in-shore within a radius of, at the least, 100 miles of the breeding grounds, through 

 intervals varying, as I have said, from a single day to three or four, as the case may be." 



