CHAPTER VII 

 THE WALRUS, MORSE, OR SEA-HORSE 



FROM the Sirenia to the Walrus is one of the easiest 

 steps, for Sea Vitch, as Kiphng calls the latter, is 

 ugly and uncouth enough to be one of the very same 

 family as the dugong, although in truth he is nothing 

 of the sort. But at the outset I feel impelled to enter 

 a stem protest against the gross libel upon that beauti- 

 ful animal the horse, perpetrated by calling the Walrus 

 a sea-horse and the hippopotamus a river-horse. What, 

 in the name of common-sense, have either of these most 

 ungainly brutes in common with one of the most elegant 

 and beautiful of all known animals ? Not that I would 

 rashly call any of the Creator's wonderful designs ugly 

 — I do but speak after the manner of men. But there 

 does appear to me to be such an utter lack of apprecia- 

 tion of similarity in the conferring of titles like the 

 foregoing. Nor is the manatee any more like a cow ; 

 still, there is not quite the same jar to our sensibilities 

 in the comparison, since the cow is not what one would 

 truthfully describe as graceful, either in outline or 

 movement. 



Perhaps of all land-walking animals, not even the 

 Myrmecophagus, none can compete with the Walrus 

 for clumsiness. He has a gigantic body — in the fullest- 

 grown adult about a ton in weight — and about as 

 unsymmetrical as a leathern bag of oil or the body of a 

 hippopotamus. It is covered with a tough gnarled 



n 



