The Zoologist — November, 1873. 3767 



few hours before, a round white object on the ground a hun- 

 dred yards away attracted our notice. As it could not well 

 be a quartz boulder on that slope, I went back to see what it 

 might be. It was a human slvull. Beside it was a scapula and 

 part of a rib, together with the lower jaw and some loose teeth. 

 Where the breast had been were scattered leaves of metallic tablets 

 impressed with effigies of saints and some words in Russian, and 

 there were remnants of the rosary to which it had apparently been 

 attached. An empty powder-horn was close at hand, marked with 

 a small cross cut out with a knife : these articles I preserved. The 

 bones I carefully gathered together, and committed to the ground 

 with such words of the English Office for the Burial of the Dead as 

 time permitted me to use ; and then we left the grave and returned 

 to the ship. 



Ursus maritimus. — We had several opportunities of watching 

 bears on the ice. They were in most cases too distant from the 

 ship to be molested, and so we could observe them through tele- 

 scopes at our leisure, and learn something of their natural habits. 

 They can rarely be detected when they are not moving. Dirty 

 pieces of ice attract little notice ; so do the bears, which resemble 

 them in colour, so long as they keep still ; but when they start 

 upon their travels they become conspicuous objects. They stride 

 along leisurely, with so even a gait that the eye, deceived by the 

 ease of their movements, can hardly realize the rapidity of their 

 progress over the floe. We could see them catch seals sometimes. 

 One bear, sauntering along, walked up to his seal and took hold of 

 it without any formality whatever ; another caught his dinner by 

 suddenly pouncing upon it; another dragged himself over the ice 

 with his fore paws, like a dog scraping itself along the ground, and 

 executed a regular stalk. Off Low Island a bear sat down upon 

 its hams to admire the ship and give itself a thorough scratching 

 with its fore paws, like a lively Esquimaux. I did not find ticks 

 upon the skins of any of those which were shot. It is the fashion 

 in the Greenland Sea to believe nothing which anyone of another 

 ship than your own may please to tell you : our men observed this 

 custom pretty strictly ; and there were some things in which we 

 began to be disposed to adopt a similar principle. One of these 

 things was arctic literature. Whenever the tedium of a foggy day 

 had to be relieved, the sufferer had recourse to some work on 

 arctic exploration. Talk of the effect of " extractum carnis" on a 



