280 THE VARIOUS ACCOUNTS, [N°. 118. ] 
the approximation made to the total length of the animal, as “(at 
the very least) sixty feet”. This is the only part of the decription, 
however, which seems to me to be so uncertain as to be inadmiss- 
ible, in an attempt to arrive at a right conclusion as to the nature — 
of the animal. The more certain characters of the animal are 
these: — Head with a convex, moderately capacious cranium, short 
obtuse muzzle, gape of the mouth not extending further than to 
beneath the eye, which is rather small, round, filling closely the 
palpebral aperture; colour, dark brown above, yellowish white 
beneath ; surface smooth, without scales, scutes, or other conspicuous 
modifications or hard and naked cuticle. And the captain says, 
“Had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should have easily 
recognized his features with my naked eye.” Nostrils not mentioned, 
but indicated in the drawing by a crescentic mark at the end of 
the nose or muzzle. All these are the characters of the head of a 
warm-blooded mammal — none of them those of a cold-blooded 
reptile or fish. Body long, dark brown, not undulating, without 
dorsal or other apparent fins; “but something like the mane of a 
horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed, washed about its back.” 
The character of the mteguments would be a most important one 
for the zoologist in the determination to the class to which the 
above defined creature belonged. If an opinion can be deduced as 
to the mteguments from the above indication, it is that the spe- 
cies had hair, which, if it was too short and close to be distin- 
guished on the head, was visible where it usually is the longest, 
on the middle line of the shoulders or advanced part of the back , 
where it was not stiff and upright like the rays of a fin, but 
“washed about.’ Guided by the above interpretation, of the “mane 
of a horse, or a bunch of sea-weed”’, the animal was not a ceta- 
ceous mammal, but rather a great seal. But what seal of large 
size, or indeed of any size, would be encountered in latitude 24° 
44’ south, and longitude 9° 22’ east — viz. about three hundred 
miles from the western shore of the southern end of Afrika? ‘The 
most likely species to be there met with are the largest of the 
seal tribe, e. g. Anson’s sea lion, or that known to the southern 
whalers by the name of the sea-elephant, the Phoca proboscidea, 
which attains the length of from twenty to thirty feet. These great 
seals abound in certain of the islands of the southern and antarctic 
seas, from which an individual is occasionally floated off upon an 
iceberg. The sea lion exhibited in London last spring, which was 
a young individual of the Phoca proboscidea was actually captured 
