The Zoologist— November, 1873. 377] 



unexpectedly, fired at them at a distance of about eighty yards, 

 and missed them cleanly. Startled by the report, the deer began 

 to trot away from them, but she soon turned and advanced towards 

 them ; when she was within fifty yards of them they fired again, 

 and this time with effect : they did not see the fawn at all until 

 they found it dead beside its mother, killed by the same bullet. Up 

 to that time we had accounted for the existence of deers' traces on 

 the Seven Islands in the following way. Deer, it is said, can 

 manage to live comfortably without food for six days : they can 

 find something to eat on Walden Island, if they cannot on any of 

 the others. Starting, therefore, from Walden Island, they could 

 well afford to make the grand tour, spending a day upon each of 

 the others, without being actually reduced to extreme starvation. 

 Naturally they would gladly cast their antlers by the way to save 

 the trouble of carriage, and people finding them upon the rocks 

 would at first suppose that deer really could pick up plenty of food 

 where they could see nothing but stones. 



BalcBua mysticeius.—ln various places along the coast we found 

 many whales' bones of great age at considerable heights above the 

 sea. These evidences of upheaval having taken place within the 

 last few centuries have attracted the notice of all geologists who 

 have visited the Spitsbergen Archipelago. Amoi:gst localities from 

 which these bones have not been reported before, I may mention 

 Carl's Island, at the lower entrance of Hinlopen's Straits. There 

 we found a large jaw-bone, much decayed, partly embedded in 

 drift-shingle at an elevation of eighty or a hundred feet above high- 

 water mark. At a lower level, but yet far beyond the present 

 influence of ice or sea were jaws and some broken vertebrae in 

 Augusta Bay. The only living right whale that we saw was at 

 the Western Ice; its blast was just like a puff of steam from the 

 escape-pipe of a brewery engine; but it does not do to use such 

 untechnical language in Greenland, unless you are talking to an 

 old salt : he no doubt will overlook the offence for the sake of the 

 associations which it may recall to his mind. 



A. E. Eaton. 



(To be continued.) 



Note.— I have had before me a paper by my friend Prof. A. Nesvton, of 

 Magdalen College, Cambridge, " Notes on the Zoology of Spitsbergen " 

 (Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., November, 1864). lu it will be found uume°rous 

 references to other authors. On many points upon which we have touched 



