WEDDELL’S SEAL. 17 
westward across McMurdo Sound. The distance in yards is given between the 
holes :— 
Hole No. 1 For egress and ingress. 
400 yards to No. 2 Blow-hole only. 
140 yards to No. 3 Blow-hole only. 
200 yards to No. 4 For egress and ingress, 1 ¢ seal out. 
140 yards to No. 5 For egress and ingress, many signs of occupation. 
60 yards to No. 6 Blow-hole only. 
150 yards to No. 7 Blow-hole only. 
180 yards to No. 8 For egress and ingress, 1 ¢ seal out. 
The depth of water beneath these holes was about 300 fathoms. By such signs as the 
above, and without actually seeing by any means so large a number of seals as in the 
summer, we gradually convinced ourselves that there were, nevertheless, a large number 
upon the spot. Nor were those that we saw or caught of any one age or sex. Some 
were males and just as many were females ; some were yearlings, but many more, as 
one would expect, were adults. All were very fat, and their coats in excellent 
condition ; perhaps the fattest of all, at any period of the year, were the adult females 
that we met with in the spring. The huge animals used to collect in various secluded 
spots, often many miles from open water, as for example at Pram Point to the south 
of Cape Armitage, where from twenty to twenty-five miles of solid ice separated them 
from the nearest open sea. There they lay, entering the water from time to time by 
holes or cracks amongst the pressure ridges, throughout September and October, 
waiting for the birth of their young. These began to appear first on October 22nd in 
1902, and on October 25th in 1903, at the Pram Point rookery, which was not only 
the largest but the nearest of all that we met with in McMurdo Sound. If we 
wandered northwards, along the west coast of Ross Island, we could find here and 
there, along the tide crack, a group of breeding Weddells. Further still, if we came 
to Tortoise Rock we found again mothers and young amongst all the pressure ridges 
around that island, and by the tongue of a glacier, or away amongst the Delbridge 
Islands, again large numbers of old and young, but nowhere were they so plentiful or 
so convenient for observation as amongst the ridges of broken ice about Pram Point. 
This nursery was visited every day or two as the state of the weather allowed ; and 
here, on returning from a sledge journey in 1903, I found that Hodgson had generously 
“ear-marked” every infant as it was born by attaching a tin label with a number to 
its hinder flipper, much against the infant’s will and often enough with scanty approval 
from its parent. By means of these labels we were to some extent able to watch 
the changes in the coat of the infants during the first month of their existence (see 
figs. 12 and 13, p. 16; also figs. 14 and 15, p. 18). 
At birth the young Weddell’s Seal is clothed in a woolly coat of long hair, of a 
rusty greyish colour, presenting but the faintest indication of any marking (see 
figs. 16 and 17, p. 20). This woolly coat consists of two varieties of hair, the one 
2°8 cm. long, fine, and almost straight; the other shorter, fine, and very curly, so 
VOL, II. C 
