360 Selous: Observations on the Grey Seal. 
slept, but I do not think so, since none lay there this morning— 
(OCTOBER IQTH now)—though one, a full-grown female, swam 
about for sometime in one of the little inlets of the sea running 
up tothe shed. As the tide sank, it afterwards disappeared— 
not landing, I believe—and has not again returned, nor has 
any grown Seal visited this whilom resort of theirs, all day 
long, so far as I have been able to observe. In fact, it is very 
evident that the Seals have withdrawn from this cove, as from 
a populous resort, such is their appreciation of the upright 
human form, that 
‘... far nobler shape, erect and tall, 
Godlike erect, in native honour clad, 
In naked majesty id 
But the passage can no longer be closely applied—perhaps 
its the clothes they object to. Shortly after the tide had begun 
to go out, however, I saw a young Seal lying approximately 
where the one that was fed yesterday had been, and, no doubt, 
the same animal. It was not however, before it was more than 
three quarters high tide again that the parent Seal appeared 
and made a long and what seemed rather a precipitious climb, 
to get to her infant, which did not, this time, come to meet her. 
As she now, in suckling it, lay on that side which presented 
her back to me, the latter had to go round, and so was invisible 
to me all the while. The time taken must, I think, have been 
fully a quarter of an hour, and then the old Seal came down by 
a still longer way, making, at the last, a long sliding drop into 
the water, over some steeply sloping rocks that overhung it. 
The male soon appeared, but there were no connubialities, 
and, after awhile, he retired again. The female kept about, off 
the shore, as if waiting for her calf, which lay most immovably 
a little higher up on the rocks than where he had been fed. 
The tide rose and rose, and the spray began slightly to touch 
him, but he took little or no notice, when, all at once—as a 
surprise, I should imagine, but perhaps it was in his previous 
experience—several big waves rushed,* one after another, up 
the rock and burst in foam and thunder all over him. The 
young Seal was swept right away into the sea—invisibly, 
however, so lost was he in the white seething caldron—and it 
was not till a considerable while afterwards that I saw him, 
again, for certain, swimming off the shore, and seeming none 
the worse for his accident, if it can be considered as one. The 
sea now rushed foaming over the rocks on which his mother 
had just fed him, making a broad strait (in proportion with 
* Three or four, I think—those ‘three kicks of the sea,’ which shore 
folk and fishermen speak of; and rightly, in a rough way, to go by my 
own experience here. In another such instance I should certainly have 
been washed off the rocks myself had I not been warned in time. 
Naturalist, 
