R. BROWN ON THE SEALS OF GREENLAND. 61 



any distance from land it is almost always on shoals, where it 

 can obtain the Moliusca which form the bulk of its food. The 

 Seal-hunters never see it, nor is it found among the flocks of 

 Seals on the Spitzbergen and Jan Mayen pack-ice. It is found 

 all along the circumpolar shores of Asia, America, and Europe, 

 sometimes extending into the subpolar, and even stragglers 

 find their way into the temperate, regions of America, Asia, 

 and Europe. It is not unlikely that it may even be found 

 in the Antartic regions. On the north-west coast of America I 

 have known it to come as far south as 50° N. lat. The Indians 

 along the shores of Alaska (lately Russian America) carve the 

 teeth into many fanciful ornaments ; * but we should be liable to 

 fall into an error from seeing these teeth among the natives so 

 far south, if we did not know that they are bartered from the 

 more northern tribes. On the American Atlantic seaboard the 

 Walrus comes as far south as the Grulf of St. Lawrence, and 

 stragglers even further. In Lord Shuldham's day they assembled 

 on the Magdalene Islands in that gulf to the number of 7,000 or 

 8,000 ; and sometimes as many as 1,600 were killed (or rather 

 slaughtered) at one onset by the hunters who pursued them.f It 

 has been killed several times on the British coast ; and I suspect 

 that it is not an unfrequent visitor to our less-frequented shores. 

 Perhaps not a few of the " Sea-horses " and * Sea-cows " which 

 every now and again terrify the fishermen on the shores of the 

 wild western Scottish lochs, and get embalmed among their 

 folklore, may be the Walrus. In addition to those already re- 

 corded I know of one which was seen in Orkney in 1857, and 

 another the Shetland fishermen told me had been seen in the 

 Nor' Isles about the same time. One was killed on East Heiskar, 

 Hebrides, by Capt McDonald, R.N., in April 1841 ; and 

 another in the River Severn in 1839 (" Edin. Journ. Nat. Phys. 

 *' Sciences," 1839-40). There is, however, some ground for 

 believing that at one time it was, if not a regular member of 

 our fauna, at least a very frequent visitor. Hector Boece (or 

 Boethius, as his name has been Latinised), in his quaint " Cronikles 

 " of Scotland," mentions it towards the end of the fifteenth century 

 as one of the regular inhabitants of our shores ; and old Roman 

 historians describe the horse-gear and arms of the ancient Britons 

 as ornamented with bright polished ivory. It is difficult to 

 suppose that this could have been anything else but the carved 

 tusks of the Walrus. It is not, however, without the bounds of 

 possibility that this might have been some of the African Ele- 

 phants' ivory which the Phoenician traders bartered for tin with 

 the natives of the Cassiterides. Except for its occasional move- 

 ments from one portion of its feeding- ground to the other, the 

 Walrus cannot be classed among the migratory animals. In 



* My friend Mr. A. G. Dallas, late Governor-General of the Hudson's Bay 

 Company's territories, has a bust of himself beautifully carved out of a Walrus- 

 tooth, by a Tsimpshean Indian at Fort Simpson, B.C. 



t Phil. Trans., Ixv., pi. 1, p. 249, &c. Apud Pennant, "Arctic Zoology," 

 p. 148-50. 



