736 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1038 



with a new glow. Is there any joy of service 

 to be compared with that of the investigator 

 who has wrung a new secret from the heart 

 of nature, listening when she has whispered a 

 single syllable of truth unuttered before, who 

 has been able to add a single stone to the 

 great temple of learning, the noblest of all the 

 structures ever reared by man? Is there any 

 more religious calling than thus thinking 

 God's thoughts after him, and proclaiming 

 the gospel of truth to confirm faith, prevent ill- 

 ness, deepen self-knowledge and that of society, 

 industry, give us mastery over the physical, 

 chemical, biological energies that control the 

 world, and develop mathematics, the language 

 of all who think exactly, a language which all 

 sciences tend to speak in proportion as they 

 become complete? This is why research is re- 

 ligious and the knowledge gained in the lab- 

 ■oratory to-day may set free energies that bene- 

 fit the whole race to-morrow. Is not an insti- 

 itution devoted, heart and soul, to this sort of 

 •work, the best thing any community can have 

 im its midst, and should it not be cherished as 

 the heart of this " Heart of the Common- 

 wealth " ? 



G. Stanley Hall 

 Clark TJniveesity 



RUSSIAN VEBSUS AMERICAN SEALINGi- 

 In recent discussions of matters relating to 

 the fur seals of the Pribilof Islands great 

 stress has been laid in certain quarters upon 

 the similarity between the recent crisis in the 

 herd's condition and a crisis in which it found 

 itself in 1834, during Eussian control. Since 

 1896 pelagic sealing has been looked upon by 

 the majority of those having to do with the 

 herd as the sole cause of its decline. But in 

 1834 and prior to that time there was no 

 pelagic sealing, only land sealing. The argu- 

 ment, has, therefore, been that land sealing 

 was common to both crises and hence a prob- 

 able cause of decline in one as well as in the 

 other. 



Land sealing as practised upon the islands 

 1 Presented at the forty-fourth annual meeting 

 of the American Fisheries Society in Washington, 

 D. C, September 30-October 3, 1914. 



since 1868, when the herd came into the pos- 

 session of the United States, has consisted in 

 the taking of the superfluous young male seals 

 at or about the age of three years, the fur seal 

 being polygamous and its handling being 

 analogous to that of the commoner domestic 

 animals. Pelagic sealing was an indiscrim- 

 inate form of sealing, conducted in the open 

 sea, while the animals were on their winter 

 migration in the Pacific Ocean or on their 

 summer feeding excursions in Bering Sea, 

 both of which take them far from land. In- 

 vestigations of the pelagic catch show conclu- 

 sively that sixty-five to eighty-five per cent, of 

 the animals taken have been gravid or nursing 

 females, with which died their unborn or de- 

 pendent young. 



There can be no dispute regarding these two 

 forms of sealing, as they have been conducted, 

 at least since the beginning of pelagic sealing, 

 about the year 1880; the records are exact and 

 complete. The question therefore turns upon 

 the nature of Russian sealing at and prior to 

 1834, of which the records are not so complete. 



In the debates in congress upon the fur-seal 

 law of 1912, in which land sealing was sus- 

 pended, as a measure necessary for the pro- 

 tection and preservation of the herd, Senator 

 Shively, of Indiana, made the principal speech 

 in the Senate, taking as his thesis the asser- 

 tion that the Russians never killed anything 

 but bachelor seals. Representative Goodwin, 

 of Arkansas, made the leading speech in the 

 House and his thesis was that the Russians 

 did not kill female seals. These speeches were 

 alleged to have been based upon the official 

 records of Russian operations. Their pur- 

 pose was to show that the Russian sealing, 

 which was followed by the disaster of 1834, 

 was identical with that conducted on land by 

 the United States in the disastrous period 

 culminating in 1911, that is — confined to the 

 bachelor seals or superfluous males. 



Our knowledge of Russian conditions is de- 

 rived exclusively from the writings of Bishop 

 Ivan Veniaminof, a Greek-Russian priest, lo- 

 cated for the period in question at Unalaska, 

 and a brief extract from the report of an 

 agent of the Russian government, Tanovsky 



