“5 
OTAKTES AND ESEALS 
pedia are most nearly allied. An alternative name to 
otary as applied to the whole group is eared seal; both 
these names embody a fact which is of considerable 
importance for the discrimination of these aquatic 
carnivora from seals and walruses. They possess 
indeed a tiny external ear, the conch as it is called, 
which is completely absent in the seals. Theseals and 
walruses have to get along with a mere hole in the side 
of the head, and are in the position of a seventeenth 
century political or religious offender, who has had his 
ears cropped. The persistence of this external ear is 
one of several features in which the otaries have retained 
more of the characteristics of a land-living ancestor than 
have the seals. Other points which can be readily seen 
in the living examples at the Zoo are the following. The 
fore and hind flippers are not merely flippers as they are 
in the seal; indeed in the latter animal, the hind 
flippers are, as it were, soldered to the tail, and form 
with it a single steering apparatus. In the sea lions and 
sea bears the flippers have still got some independent 
movement and their possessors can shuffle along on the 
land in a successful if awkward fashion, while the seal 
can merely wriggle along as would a man whose legs 
and arms had been tied to his body. More than this, 
the nostrils are at the end of the snout in otaries, and on 
the upper surface in seals, a position which is more 
convenient in an aquatic animal whose aim in life 
it is to respire at the surface of the water with as little 
as possible of the body showing. These various features 
lead us to the not unnatural inference that the true seals 
have been for a longer period adapted to a purely 
aquatic existence than have the sea lions. The more 
obvious neck contrasting with the “ bull neck ”’ of seals 
isa fact to be urged as pointing in the same direction, 
while the claws on the hands and feet, though also to be 
regarded as survivals, are to be met with in the seals, 
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