THE WALRUS IN BRITISH WATERS 5 
THE WALRUS IN BRITISH WATERS. 
By JAMES RITCHIE, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S.E. 
THE Walrus can no longer be reckoned a member of the 
fauna of Scotland. Its visits nowadays do not rank it as 
more than the most casual of stragglers, a waif borne by 
some rare combination of chances to a distant shore. But 
once, so the unravelling of its story indicates, the Walrus 
was not only a familiar inhabitant of our coasts, but 
frequented seas some considerable distance farther south. 
Two causes seem to have disturbed its habits and gradually 
to have transformed the native into a marvellously rare 
stranger. The first was physical and long continued, a 
secular change which drove northward the ice-packs of the 
Glacial Period and replaced in Scotland an arctic by a 
temperate climate; the second was human, and has been in 
force for not many hundreds of years, the deliberate and 
organised destruction of the Walrus herds of northern seas 
for the sake of the commercial products they yielded. I 
propose in this paper to state the facts which suggest these 
and other conclusions. 
In Prehistoric Times—The Walrus is an inhabitant of 
Arctic coasts. It hugs the land, being found usually on 
shore or on the coastal ice, and is seldom found far out at 
sea, except on ice. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose 
that, when the polar ice-sheet extended much farther south, 
and during its retreat in the latter stage of the Ice Age, was 
setting free the ice-bound shores of Britain, the Walrus herds 
accompanied the margin of the ice-field, and sported in the 
seas to which glaciers descended from the backbone of 
Scotland. Is the supposition supported by any evidence 
that the Walrus was in existence during the Ice Age, and 
that it did actually occur so far south as the British Isles ? 
Even in the Pliocene period, which preceded the Ice Age, 
a close relative of the Walrus of to-day, namely Alachtherium 
cretst, left its remains in the Crag deposits of Belgium, and 
several Walruses’ tusks, found in the same country and also 
