SEALS AND SEALERS. 253 
seems very little on which to base such assertion. And if the 
influence exist at all, it can, at the most, only form one of 
many causes which combine to produce variations such as those 
which Mr. Lucas has tried to explain. 

SEALS AND SEALERS. 
By Tuomas SoutHwELL, F.Z.S. 
Ir is very difficult, when writing for a purpose, to avoid ex- 
tremes, and, when it happens that the purpose which inspires the 
pen is one of kindly feeling for a class of animals so harmless 
and beautiful as the Seals, it is hardly a matter of surprise that a 
tender-hearted lady should express somewhat strongly the pity 
she feels so acutely. Every lover of Nature can but sympathise 
with and admire the sentiments which have prompted Lady Blake 
to denounce what she so feelingly deplores ; but when, in her recent 
article in the ‘ Nineteenth Century,’ she stigmatises as “savages” 
a class of men employed in an arduous and dangerous, but 
legitimate industry, such as that followed by the St. John’s Seal- 
hunters, she certainly does these bread-winners an injustice. By 
her own showing the employment is one of extreme peril and 
privation, from ice, storm, frost, and exposure, and if the 
remuneration last season, in the case of the most successful 
voyage ever known, that of the ‘ Neptune,’ did not exceed £13 15s. 
per man, poor indeed must be the general return for so great an 
expenditure of energy and endurance. 
As well might Lady Blake stigmatise as savages the large 
number of respectable men who gain their daily bread by the 
occupation of slaughtermen as the poor sealers of St. John’s, 
who, however revolting their calling may be, are equally inoffensive 
members of the community, and—not to justify one cruelty by 
another—the misery inflicted in the daily slaughter of calves and 
pigs must far exceed that inflicted every season on the New- 
foundland ice-fields. The writer does not know personally a 
single St.John’s sealer, but he does know several who attend the 
Greenland sealing, and he would be sorry to regard men as 
“‘ savages’ who have, on their own petition, obtained enactments 
which have rendered impossible, in the present day, what were 
undoubtedly the most cruel features in the Greenland sealing as 
formerly prosecuted. 
