HUNTING OF SEALS. 37 



North. The names of Rask, Rafn, Muller, Schlegel, Finn 

 Magnusen, and others, are here most honourably conspi- 

 cuous. 



Seals were also at all seasons sought for and surprised 

 on the rocks. In the dusk of the evening, a man thus 

 engaged in an attack upon a few females who were lying 

 at some little distance from the water, in making a blow 

 at one of them slipped his foot and fell ; the seal anxious 

 to get to the sea sledged herself over him ; four or five 

 others rapidly followed in her wake over the body of the 

 prostrate Homo Sapiens, before he, oppressed by these 

 night mares, and petrified with terror, could elevate his 

 " frons divina." But his fears were groundless, the seals 

 had other " fish to fry," escape not combat was their object, 

 for they never attack man but when opposed in their retreat 

 to the water, and this our hero was railwise facilitating 

 rather than obstructing. A curious anecdote was related 

 to me in Faroe of a native Waterton assailing, on the rocks, 

 a male of the Great Seal, but not being able to detain him, 

 actually got astride on his back, endeavouring to behead him 

 at the gallop, and slipped out of the stirrups hardly in time 

 to allow his Barb, mortally wounded, to take his leap, all 

 alone, into the water. Lucas Debes, the old historian of 

 those remote isles, and Donald Maclean, in his account of 

 one of the Hebrides, make mention of the practice of hunt- 

 ing seals with dogs ; the services of which, however, could 

 amount only to irritating them to resistance, and thus bv de- 

 taining them a little to gain time to the hunter to attack 

 them with the club, for the strength of any dog is utterly 

 trifling compared with that of a seal of ordinary size. 



Within even the last twenty years, both species of seal 

 have become much more rare and cautious, so that the net 

 and the gun remain almost the only means of capture In 

 a few districts the net is employed for taking the Common 



