WALRUS AND EARED SEALS 407 



that is to say, cockles, Myas, Mactras, and other bur- 

 rowing shellfish, the digging out of which from the 

 sand and gravel seems to be the chief use of the great 

 tusks. The walrus is now verging rapidly towards 

 extinction. In Spitzbergen, where thirty or forty 

 years ago it was in prodigious numbers, it is now 

 scarce, and, in fact, the once great herds which existed 

 in that region, at Nova Zembla, and in Greenland, 

 are already a thing of the past. The Pacific walrus is 

 confined to a narrow stretch of coast in North-Eastern 

 Asia, and a still smaller part of the opposite American 

 coast. Here in the early part of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury Middendorff described them as existing in hun- 

 dreds of thousands, and even between 1870 and 1880 

 the tusks of about 12,000 walruses were brought 

 annually to San Francisco by the American whalers. 

 In the Pribylov Islands, where they were still numerous 

 in 1874, I only saw in 1897 a single dead carcass. The 

 walrus has several times been known to wander to the 

 northern and western coasts of Scotland, the last time 

 about 1857 ; but we may take it as certain that such an 

 event will not happen again. 



The Eared Seals, or Otariidse, form the third and 

 last family of the Pinnipedes. These include, in the 

 first place, the genus Otaria, the Fur Seals, so well 

 known for the international complications to which 

 they have given rise. The genus does not occur in 

 the Northern Atlantic ; its distribution would seem to 

 be in the main Antarctic, from which ocean the range 

 of one species to the Behring Sea appears to be a great 

 but exceptional extension. Everywhere we have here a 

 record of exterminations, and even in the Pribylov 

 Islands the herds are now but a shadow of their former 

 greatness. The chief breeding-places of Fur Seals are, 

 or were, in the Antarctic region, at the Auckland 



