4660 THE ZooLtoGist—OcToBER, 1875. 
the direction of Prof. Peters. The skeleton, when ready, will be 
mounted and placed by its side in the museum. 
Though the existence of this wonderful seal was made known 
more than a century ago by Pernetty, and subsequently described 
with more or less graphic detail and exactness by Anson, Cox, 
Péron, and other antarctic explorers, when it inhabited com- 
paratively accessible localities, there was, so far as I know, no 
full-grown male specimen in any European museum until this one 
reached Berlin; and it is only a full-grown male, as is well known, 
which possesses the remarkable nasal appendage which suggested 
the name “sea elephant.” A young male can hardly be dis- 
tinguished from a female. Some writers have described the 
appendage as a sort of trunk, more than a foot long; indeed it is 
so figured in the plates to Péron’s ‘ Voyage aux Terres Australes ;’ 
but Anson, speaking of those he found at the island of Juan Fer- 
nandez, compared it to the wattles of a cock. ‘The justice of this 
comparison is well shown in the Berlin specimen. The appendage 
is there seen to be a hoodlike dilatation of the nostrils, much 
wrinkled and puckered, and subdivided by transverse constrictions 
at intervals of about three inches. It was found impossible to 
extend it into anything like a trunk, though it was quite soft and 
flexible when it arrived, having been sent home in salt. In fact, it 
closely resembles the “hood” of the bladder-nosed seal (Cystophora 
cristata), but is smaller in proportion to the size of the animal, and 
differentin shape. Péron, who described it as a trunk, was so good 
an observer, and generally so trustworthy, that I can hardly believe 
that he invented the resemblance; indeed he called the animal 
“ Phoque a trompe,” in consequence of its possession of it. Might 
not the individuals that he described, which inhabited Bass’s Straits, 
have belonged to a different species? The upper lip is about two 
inches high, above which the crest, or hood, rises four inches more, 
and is prolonged backwards over quite half the head, in the integu- 
ments of which it is gradually absorbed. ‘The animal measures 
fourteen feet six inches in length from tip of nose to tip of tail, and 
sixteen feet three and a half inches to the extremity of the hind 
flippers, taking the measurements along the curve of the back. The 
total length along the ground is fourteen feet one inch. The girth 
is eleven feet, measured just behind the hands. The vast bulk of 
the fore part of the body; the diminutive hands, armed with long 
nails; the short, widely-spreading feet; the thick, clumsy neck, 
