THE SEAL AND WHALE FISHERY OF 1893. 133 



seals are not so gregarious in their habits, and therefore more 

 scattered, and not to be cleared off in the same wholesale manner 

 as at the Newfoundland and Greenland young sealing ; this is in 

 their favour, but if they are pursued with the same relentless 

 avidity as in the north, and do not speedily learn to shun their 

 new enemy, their days are certainly numbered. A member of the 

 late expedition writes to ' The Times' as follows : — 



"The present generation [of Seals] has never seen man, and they 

 survey him open-mouthed and fearful, during which process they are laid 

 low with club and bullet. Sometimes they are so lazy with sleep that 

 a man may dig them in the side with the muzzle of his gun, and, wondering 

 what is disturbing their slumbers, they raise their head, which quickly 

 falls pierced with a bullet. There may be only one seal on a piece of ice, 

 which is usually the case with the larger kind ; but the smaller kinds lie 

 in half-dozens and tens, and as many as forty-seven were seen on one 

 piece. Seldom do they escape — one cartridge means one seal." 



Of the species of the seals met with I have no certain infor- 

 mation ; I have seen nothing definite published, and no material 

 seems to have reached our National Museums ; but in a single para- 

 graph devoted to this subject in a paper read by Dr. W. C. Donald 

 before the Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh in January 

 last, the species are said to be four in number, and are probably 

 identical with those observed by Ross and previous voyagers in 

 the same latitudes — namely, the Leopard Seal, Stenorhynchus 

 leptonyx (de Blainville) ; the Crab-eating Seal, Lobodon carcino- 

 phaga (Gray) ; Weddell's Seal, Lyptonychotes weddelli (Lesson) ; 

 and the rare Ross's Seal, Ommatophoca rossi (Gray) ; but I hear 

 that Prof. D'Arcy Thompson, of Dundee, has had the zoological 

 results of the voyage submitted to him, and we shall probably be 

 better informed in due time. The only Cetaceans seen were a 

 single individual of a species of Megaptera, which was harpooned 

 and lost, a large number of Balcsnoptera, a species of " Grampus," 

 a " Bottlenose," and several schools of what was "possibly a 

 species of Globicephalus." Of birds, twenty species in all were 

 obtained. 



The vessels left the Falkland Islands at dates varying from 

 the 8th to the 11th December, and were no more heard of till the 

 'Polar Star' touched at Stanley Harbour on the 17th February, 

 the interval having been spent in cruising in the neighbourhood 



