ESTIMATES OF MR. ELLIOTT. 79 
That they were so was held as a tradition from Elliott’s time down to 1896. It was, 
however, a great mistake to assume, as has been done, that at that time all the seals 
were present. Counts of live pups! made in the seasons of 1896 and 1897 show that at 
the height of the season not over half of the cows are actually present at any one time. 
The apparent stability of the rookeries is due to the fact that then the arrivals and 
departures among the cows for a time practically balance each other at their maximum 
point. But daily counts of the rookeries show that the stability is in no sense real, 
there being from day to day even then a variation of from 10 to 30 per cent in the 
rookery population.” 
RESULTS OF MR. ELLIOTI’S ENUMERATION. 
But of these things Mr. Elliott was not aware. He was content to assume that 
all the cows were there and, moreover, though he could not locate the virgin 2-year- 
olds, a class of animals numbering, in his estimate, 225,000, which were not present 
until long after it was made, he did not hesitate to assume that they were included. 
He was also content with his impossible law of distribution. It only remained for him, 
therefore, to find the area of breeding ground occupied and to divide it by the unit of 
space to be assigned to each individual animal, to arrive at the rookery population. 
As a result he found, in his estimate of 6,386,840 square feet of rookery ground on the 
two islands, “room,” as he puts it, ‘for 3,193,420 breeding seals and young.” ° 
THE FIGURES UNREASONABLE. 
Waiving, for a moment, the method of obtaining these figures, we may remark 
that they are not easy to understand. Of this total of “breeding seals and young,” 
Mr. Elliott, in thg same connection, tells us that 1,000,000 are “young.” There must 
then be an equal number of mothers, or 2,000,000 adult breeding females and their 
pups. To this must be added the young 2-year-old cows which are included, though 
not present. Mr. Elliott has himself given us an estimate of these. Considering 
that of the 1,000,000 pups born 500,000 are females, he says that “at least 225,000 of 
them safely return in the second season after birth.” This, therefore, gives us a total 
of 2,225,000 females and young in the complete estimate of 3,193,420, leaving 868,420 
animals which can only be accounted for as breeding bulls. This is impossible, and 
yet no other explanation of the discrepancy is at hand. Mr. Elliott estimates, in a 
separate category, all the nonbreeding males and the yearling females, finding 
1,500,000 of them. Of the breeding bulls, as a class, Mr. Elliott does not give usa 
separate estimate in 1872, but in 1890 he tells us they numbered 90,000 at that time. 
THE METHOD OF ENUMERATION FAULTY. 
But if these figures were in themselves reasonable, we must still take exception to 
the method by which they were obtained. We have already spoken of the general 
difficulties in the way of acreage measurements. On his method of surveying the 
rookeries Mr. Elliott has given us practically no data. He dismisses the subject 
with the remark “that there is no more difficulty in surveying these margins than 
there is in drawing sight along the curbs of a stone fence surrounding a field,” a 
statement which is not by any means self-evident to anyone who has visited the 
1See page 109. *See page 54. %Elliott, Monograph of Fur-Seal Islands, 1881, p. 61. 
