The Zoologist— Ma V, 1866. 201 



same colour as most seals — a dark iron-grey above, lighter beneath. 

 It is a very powerful animal : 1 saw one that had received three 

 Enfield bullets through the nape of its neck, and had been 

 bleediiig profusely for about half an hour; yet it nearly succeeded in 

 capsizing a large whale-boat with five men in her, owing to the clum- 

 siness of the harpooner. We constantly saw this species at a 

 considerable distance from land — ten to twenty miles, off the west 

 coast of Spitsbergen, mostly between Bell Sound and Ice Fjord; and 

 a voung male of the previous year was shot from the deck of the yacht, 

 and afterwards harpooned, on the 29lh July, about fifteen miles from 

 South Cape. 



We saw no other mammals in Ice Fjord. Our pilot pointed out to 

 me one day a place where, many years ago, a jaegt's crew, of which he 

 himself was one, killed nine polar bears; but no such good fortune 

 attended us. This same man informed me that he knew of the 

 occurrence in Spitsbergen of a " hermelin," a species which has not 

 hitherto been recorded from that couutrj-, though it is probable that 

 the " creature, somewhat larger than a weasel, with short ears, long 

 tail, and skin spotted white and black," stated to have been seen on Low- 

 Island by Dr. Irving in Lord Mulgrave's Voyage,t was nothing else 

 but Mustela ermiuea. 



I must here mention the pleasure it was to me, and, I am sure, to 

 all the other members of our party, to fall in with the Swedish 

 Scientific Expedition, who are engaged in making a series of preli- 

 minary surveys, preparatory to measuring an arc of the meridian, in 

 Spitsbergen. To Professors Nordenskjdld and Diuier and Herr 

 Malmgren our best thanks ai"e due for their kindness in furnishing us 

 with much valuable information, the results of their former arduous 

 explorations in this distant country. 



On leaving England there had been two points in the Ornithology 

 of Spitsbergen to which I had especially meant to apply myself. The 

 first was the obtaining of a good series of speciuiens of the Spitsbergen 

 Lagopus, a single example of which, brought from that country in 

 1855 by my friend Mr. W. Sturge and the late Mr. E. Evans, had been 

 described by Mr. Gould in our ' Proceedings ' for 1858 (p. 354) as a 

 distinct species, under the name of L. hemileucurus ; the second was 

 the determination of the large species of wild goose, which the same 

 gentlemen found breeding on the shores of Ice Fjord (Ibis, 1859, 



t ' A Voyage towards the North Pole undertaken by His Majesty's command, 

 1773.' By Conslaiiline John Phipps. London: 1774, page 58. 



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