8 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 
ane boit; and eftir that they have borit ane gret hole throw 
hir tale, they festne her be the samin. Als sone as this 
fische is awalknit [awakened] scho makis hir to leip with 
gret force in the see; and fra scho find hirself fast, scho 
writhis hir out of hir awin skin, and deis [dies]. Of 
the fatnes that scho hes, is maid oulie [oil] in gret 
quantite; and of hir skin, becaus it enduris lang, is maid 
strong cabellis.” The essentials of Boece’s tale, so far as we 
are concerned here, are that the Walrus was an inhabitant 
of Orkney in the sixteenth century, and that the islanders 
valued it and utilised it for precisely those commodities which 
led to its subsequent slaughter by the seal-hunters of the 
Old and New Worlds. 
In Modern Times.—A great change has occurred in the 
standing of the Walrus before the next series of records, 
which fall within the nineteenth and the present centuries, 
begins. In place of an inhabitant of the northern isles, there 
are to be found now only occasional stragglers to our coasts; 
but even the straggling shows a gradation, as an analysis of 
the records shall show. For the sake of easy reference and 
as a preface to further discussion I give here the essential 
facts relating to all the modern occurrences known to me of 
the Walrus in the British area. The visits are grouped in 
geographical areas. 
In the past summer (1920) a rumour has been current 
amongst the fishermen of Banffshire that a Walrus had been 
seen in the southern waters of the Moray Firth, but in the 
absence of further information the rumour is too indefinite 
to be regarded as a record. 
The records in the following list are not all equally valuable. 
There is some indefiniteness as to time and a shade of 
uncertainty as to identification in Tudor’s records (4 and 
7) from Shetland; the former remark also applies to the 
Shetland records of about 1870 and 1895 (6 and 8); while no 
date whatever is ascribed to the visit of a Walrus (17) to 
Longhope, Orkney, although I infer that it was previous 
to 1864. ; 
In the continuation of this paper I shall discuss the 
significance of the modern records. 
