788 Walks Round San Francisco. [ December, 
rather, it is the home of San Francisco’s lions, those sleek and 
well-fed sea lions, which are protected from slaughter by special 
legislation, that they may, in conjunction with wasteful human 
fishers, destroy the “ harvest of the waters.” The rock is within 
easy rifle-shot of the terrace of the Cliff House hotel, yet it is 
crowded with sea-lions taking their ease in all kinds of positions, 
evidently fully aware that they will not be harmed. Most of the 
colony are dozing in the sun, occasionally opening their eyes, 
raising their heads, and perhaps uttering their characteristic 
howl; but some more active, are swimming among the breakers, 
their heads alone visible above the water. “I cannot understand 
how those things can bear such a life,’ remarked a well-dressed 
woman near me, with a look of disgust. And this when the 
creatures were basking in the sun and playing in the water with 
the most evident enjoyment—perhaps they were thinking the 
same of us—who can tell ? 
The long stretch of sandy beach between Seal Rock and the 
Ocean House does not present us with many forms of marine 
life that do not also occur in the Bay of San Francisco. Cardium 
corbis and Macoma nasuta are common, and so is the pretty little 
light-reddish bivalve Mera salmonea. At intervals you may pick 
up the test of a very thin and flat cake-urchin, Echinarachnius 
excentricus A. Ag., looking like a large wafer; its height from 
crown to mouth so small that you almost wonder where the 
creature lived, and how it could ever move its heavy covering. 
On the sand banks that form the bar at the entrance of the 
harbor, at a depth of six or seven fathoms, this sea-urchin can be 
procured alive; its test is then covered with a thick array of 
small spines, so closely set that when the creature retracts its 
suckers it is difficult to make out the “petals” or curved out- 
lines of the ambulacral pores through which the suckers pro- 
truded. ‘The name “ excentricus” is very appropriate. The sys- 
tem of calcareous plates forming the crown (apical system) and 
- containing the genital and ocular plates with their pores, is not in 
the centre as it is in the allied Æ. mirabilis, but is approximated 
to the anterior extremity of the test; neither is the mouth in the 
center of the underside. Two er species of sea-urchins, or 
Echini, glorying in the names of Strongylocentrotus franciscanus 
and S. purpuratus occur along the ocean beach at points not very 
far distant from San Francisco, but are not found in its immediate 
