Of Fur Seals and Sea Lions, however, we know a good deal, and a singular history it is. They spend the greater part of the year in huge shoals in the sea, rising and falling, gambolling and diving in the water, feeding on the fish, and probably migrating from colder to warmer seas in the winter from either pole. But the interesting time of their life is in the spring, when the northern eared seals have often been watched as they come to the shores of the Aleutian Isles to bring up their families.

For then begins the fight which seals shall get the most wives. Early in May the fathers begin to arrive—strong old seals, which have gone through the battle many years before and know the rules. They are huge fellows six or seven feet long, with enormous eye-teeth and cutting teeth next to them, which together grip like a vice. They come up at first singly and then in greater numbers, swimming powerfully and laying hold of the rocks with their flippers so as to haul themselves up on land, taking the best positions they can find on the edge of the water to watch for the arrival of the mothers. Yet still more and more fathers arrive as time goes on, and these are obliged to go farther inland, for all the shore stations are soon occupied, and each sea lion defends his own plot of ground with tooth and flipper.

Fig. 82.

Sea Lions gathered on one of the Pribylov Islands, watching for wives.

Thus, in about a month’s time, from the shore right inland, the whole island is covered with male seals. And now the mothers arrive, coming to the islands that their little ones may be born. They are very much smaller, not much more than four feet long, lighter in colour than the fathers, gentle and inoffensive; and as they swim up to the island each father seal tries, by coaxing, pulling, and tugging, to persuade a mate to come on to his rock. If he succeeds he has then to keep her, for the sea lions behind, which cannot reach the sea, are on the watch to steal her.

Now he might make quite sure of his prize if he would be content with one, but he wants several; and the next young mother swimming up calls off his attention, and while he is courting her his neighbour behind tries to carry his first wife away, lifting her by the back of the neck as a cat does a kitten. Then often a terrible battle begins, and the poor mothers are pulled hither and thither till one male seal secures her, and then the whole thing begins again. This constant fighting and lovemaking go on for several days till all the sea lions have wives—those on the shore many, those behind perhaps very few. Then all settle down quietly, the little sea lions are born, bleating like young lambs, and family life begins. But the peace does not last long, for no sooner are mothers able to leave their little ones than the old contest begins again, and happy the father who can keep his wives together through a whole season!

And now comes the most remarkable point. As a rule, seals are immense eaters, and they become very fat. But from the time that the fathers land upon the rocks till they go back to the water after about two months, they have never been known to leave their position to take food, so busy are they defending their wives. And when the two months are over, during which the little ones have been trying their strength in the waves and learning to swim, the fathers, which have grown thin and meagre, having used up all their fat, swim away and do not come back. The mothers, however, with the children, and those young bachelors, which have not yet taken wives, remain on the islands sporting and enjoying themselves till autumn, when they, too, start off for the open sea till spring comes round again.

Such is the history of the eared seals. And now that we have studied their form, and seen that their skeleton is like that of other animals, though their arms and legs are disguised as flippers, we shall understand our own home seals better; for the chief difference between them and the higher seals is merely that their front legs are much shorter, and that their hind legs are turned back so as to lie in a line with the body (see Fig. 81), while they are closely bound to the tail down right as far as the heel, so that they cannot throw their hind flippers forward nor use them in walking. Thus they have become still more completely aquatic animals, using their hind legs entirely in swimming, when they serve as great oars, working something like the screw of a steamer. The consequence is that they are terribly awkward on land, though they get along very fast by jerking their body forward, or sometimes by dragging themselves by their front flippers.

This, however, matters very little to them, for their home is the sea. True, they may often be seen lying asleep on sandbanks or on rocks jutting out of the water, but they rarely venture far up the land, always remaining where they can slip back into their true home at the least alarm. So they live in the seas almost all over the world. They may be known from the higher seals chiefly by their want of outer ears, their backward-turned legs, and their feet with both the great and little toes larger than the inner ones; but their life is much the same. Some live near our own shores, especially in Scotland; some are peculiar to Australia and New Zealand; others crowd the icy seas of Greenland, sleeping in large herds on the ice-fields, where the polar bear makes them his prey; while others again live on the pack ice round the South Pole, the huge Elephant seal, with its long tapir-like nose, basking on the shores of Kerguelen’s Land and the islands of the southern seas—a monster twelve feet or more long, with his smaller wives beside him.

* * * * *

Thus the seals are bold ocean lovers, feeding entirely on animal food, and finding plenty of it in the wide sea as they roam. But there is another family of warm-blooded animals, pure vegetable-feeders, which also must have found their way in distant ages into the water; for they too are milk-givers, and though they have lost their hind legs, have still the front legs with all their proper bones, with the hands turned into flippers.

These animals are the curious sea-cows or Manatees, which wander under water along the east coast of Africa and west coast of South America, feeding in the bays and often up the rivers, on the seaweeds and water-plants of all kinds; while another kind with tusks, called the Dugong, feeds all along the shores of the Indian Ocean and Australia.

It is strange that while every child knows something about seals, very few people have heard of these gentle grazing manatees and dugongs, the only large vegetable-feeders of the sea. Yet they are curious, interesting animals, and seem to be the forms which have given rise to the popular stories of mermaids,[185] for they suckle their young ones at the breast, clasping them with their flippers, and when they raise their heads in the water have something the appearance of an uncouth mother nursing her child.

Fig. 83.

The Manatee or Sea Cow grazing.

But very uncouth indeed! for they are long barrel-shaped creatures, with a thick skin like the elephant’s, with short stiff hairs upon it. Their head is small, with no outer ears, and very insignificant eyes surrounded with wrinkles; their lips are thick, heavy, and covered with short bristles, and above them two narrow nostrils open and close according as they are above or under water. Their front flippers, which are all they have, are long and broad, with faintly-marked flat nails upon them, and behind these their body tapers away gradually into

Footnote 185. Hence their name Sirenia, a curious name for voiceless animals.

a thin, wide, shovel-shaped tail, not set edgewise as in a fish, but across the body, so as to lie like a broad leaf in the water.

Who would think that a creature like this had anything in common with land animals? Yet so it is, for not only do we know that his ancestors had traces of hind legs, but his front limbs are quite as true arms and hands as those of any of the seals. Moreover, he has large broad grinding back teeth like the elephant, and in front he has small cutting teeth as a baby, though these are covered up by the gum as he grows older. In the Australian dugong, however, these teeth continue to grow and form good-sized tusks in the fathers.

What, then, is this curious animal? Simply a vegetable-feeder which has become fitted for a watery life—a gentle, peaceable animal, which keeps near the shore and grasps the seaweed with the sides of its upper lip, and then nips it off by a set of horny plates, which grow down from the roof of its mouth, and answer to the rough wrinkles on a cow’s palate. They may often be seen together, father, mother, and child, wandering up the river Congo in Africa, or the Amazons in South America, feeding entirely under water, and only raising their heads from time to time with a snort to take in fresh air. In olden times they probably thronged all the coasts on the sea-margin, for a hundred and fifty years ago there was another group of them, the Rhytinas, right up in the cold seas of Behring’s Straits, where the vast submarine forests of seaweed afforded them plenty of food. But the sailors found them such good eating, and the fatty blubber on their bodies was so valuable, that they were all killed twenty-five years after Behring first discovered them, and unless some care is taken, the more southern sea-cows may some day be exterminated in the same way.

* * * * *

And now that we have firmly grasped the fact that the seals and manatees, however altered in shape, belong to the four-footed and milk-giving group, perhaps we shall be prepared to understand how it is that the whales[186] are not fish, though this popular delusion is one of the most difficult to overcome. “Do you really mean then,” exclaim nearly all people who are not naturalists, “that a whale is not a huge fish?” Certainly I do! A whale is no more a fish than crocodiles, penguins, or seals, are fish although they too live chiefly in the water.

A whale is a warm-blooded, air-breathing, milk-giving animal. Its fins are hands with finger-bones, having a large number of joints (see Fig. 84); its tail is a piece of cartilage or gristle, and not a fish’s fin with bones and rays; it has teeth in its gums even if it never cuts them; and it gives suck to its little one just as much as a cow does to her calf (see Fig. 85). Nay! the whalebone whales have even the traces of hind legs entirely buried under the skin (see Fig. 84), and in the Greenland whale the hip-joint and knee-joint can be distinguished with some of their muscles, though the bones are quite hidden and useless.

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