454 INVESTIGATION OF THE FUR-SEAL INDUSTRY OF ALASKA. 



Mr. Clark. Yes; that was true. 



The Chairman. That no seals were too small to be killed % 



Mr. Clark. Yes. The yearlings were not there to be killed. 



The Chairman. And that was from observation you made when 

 you were on the islands ? 



Mr. Clark. The yearlings were not there to be killed and they 

 killed all the 2-year-olds. 



The Chairman. But you stated that from actual observation on the 

 islands. Now was that true or did you mean to make a false report 

 to the Government ? 



Mr. Clark. That report was true. 



The Chairman. You did not mean to make a false report to the 

 Government, did you ? 



Mr. Clark. No; I did not. 



Mr. McGuire. Mr. Chairman, I may not be entirely clear about it, 

 but I understood Mr. Clark to state that the yearlings were not there. 

 I would like to know further about that, why the yearlings were not 

 there and how they told the yearlings were not there. 



Mr. Clark. In the first place, the yearlings appeared the next year 

 and were killed as 2-year-olds, 12,000 of them. That is positive proof 

 that the yearlings did not come to the hauling grounds in 1909, other- 

 wise they would have been killed. 



The Chairman. But you just said a moment ago that the yearlings 

 and 2-year-olds were together, and that was the reason you could 

 not tell them apart. 



Mr. Clark. I never said anything of the kind. 



The Chairmax. Let the stenographer refer to his notes and read 

 what you said. 



(The stenographer read as follows:) 



The Chairman. If you tell a yearling so readily, why can you not distinguish it 

 from a 2-year-old? 



Mr. Clark. Because they run together. * * * 



Mr. Clark. That does not mean that 2-year-olds and 1-year-olds 

 were found together. 



The Chairman. Were they separated? 



Mr. Clark. What I mean by running together is that a big year- 

 ling and a small 2-year-old approximated one another in size and 

 could not be distinguished, and I cleared it up by saying that in one 

 year a yearling might be born on the 12th of June and a 2-year-old 

 might be born on the 25th of July the next year, and those two 

 animals might grade together, not that they herded together. That 

 is not the point at all. When I speak of not being able to distinguish 

 a yearling from a 2-year-old, I have in mind that I was left on those 

 islands until the 21st day of October in 1896 with a view to deter- 

 mining those things, and I spent hours and hours and even weeks, 

 for that matter, studying the yearlings and the 2-year-olds as they 

 appeared together on the breeding grounds, not on the hauling 

 grounds. I studied those animals and I found the very greatest 

 difficulty in distinguishing them. One day I would find a very small 

 animal and decide it was a yearling and the next day I would find a 

 smaller one and that would be the yearling. When I say a man can 

 not distinguish a yearling from a 2-year-old I base it on that knowl- 

 edge and that experience in 1896, when I studied them on the breeding, 



