Fig. 78.

Polar Bear[177] and Walrus.[178]

Showing how the Bear walks with the heel flat on the ground, and the Walrus also.

A glance at a bear’s mouth will tell at once that he is partly a vegetarian, for his hind teeth are smoothed down, and as he eats he can move his lower jaw slightly from side to side, so as to chew vegetable food. Even the Polar Bear, which eats little else but fish and seals, has these same grinding teeth, and he can be fed for a long time upon

Footnote 177. Thalassarctos (ursus) maritimus.

Footnote 178. Trichechus rosmarus.

bread; while it is found that he keeps in better health when in zoological gardens if he has some grass occasionally. Still it is only the Sun Bears and Sloth Bears in India and Malacca which never eat flesh, for the Bruin of our northern countries often varies his food with deer or sheep, and grows more ferocious and flesh-feeding as he grows in years. It would almost seem as if his very laziness and awkward gait may have led him to take to vegetarianism

as a convenient change, when animal food was not handy. For though a bear can trot along at a good pace, yet his heavy lumbering body and long foot with the whole heel touching the ground[179] (see Fig. 78), make him decidedly not well fitted for a hunting animal.

How different he looks from the slim wolf running on the tips of his toes, and the graceful tiger bending his long hind legs for a leap! Yet he is a formidable animal too, for his muscles are tremendously strong, and his firmly-planted foot enables him to rise upon his hind legs and give that deadly embrace which drives the breath out of the body of his victim.

The wolf attacks with his teeth, the lion strikes with his paw, but the bear hugs his enemy to death; and here his long stiff claws serve him well, for though he cannot draw them in to keep them sharp, yet they are rough and jagged, and inflict dreadful wounds. The great Grizzly Bear of America, which is sometimes nine feet long, and strong enough to drag along the carcase of a bison, sticks his front claws into his prey while he tears the flesh with the hind feet; he is the only one, except the polar bear, which lives principally upon animal food.

In fact, the bears take much the same place in the animal world that heavy phlegmatic men do among ourselves; easy-going, but dangerous if roused, they seem to have succeeded in life more by accommodating themselves to things as they have found them, than by conquering and taking by force like the wolves and tigers. Thus a bear roams leisurely through the

Footnote 179. Plantigrade.

thick forest, for few animals care to meddle with him and he feeds wherever food comes easy, especially in the autumn when fruits abound and he can grow fat; and then he lies down to sleep in a cave or hollow tree, or in a nest of moss and leaves, till spring comes round again. Why should he trouble himself to struggle with difficulties? Unless, indeed, food is scarce, and then he sometimes has an uneasy winter, or attacks animals he would otherwise leave alone.

But if once he is roused, or if a she-bear is afraid that her cubs may be attacked, then you see that under the lazy good-nature there is plenty of pluck and ferocity. He would rather be let alone, for he looks upon life as a thing to enjoy and take leisurely, but if you will have a struggle then he will see who is master. And this kind of philosophy, somewhat easy for strong powerful creatures, has stood Bruin in good stead, for he has spread over all countries where there are thick forests, except Africa and Australia; and with his great strength and shaggy coat must have been very safe from attack till man came to annoy and worry him.

Even the polar bear, living amidst perpetual snow and ice on the shores of Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, and Greenland, has not, on the whole, a bad life of it, for he is master of the situation, and conquers and devours even the tusked walrus. The polar bear is a most interesting animal, because he shows us the bear tribe becoming adapted to a watery life. His body is much longer and more flexible than that of most bears, giving him the power to twist and turn in the water, as he swims with strong broad feet; and his long neck, narrow head, and small ears, are all fitted for a watery fishing life, while he fights entirely with his teeth and does not hug his prey. Again, the soles of his feet, instead of being bare, are covered with long stout hairs, giving him foothold upon the slippery ice, over which he travels very quickly, climbing up from time to time on the icy hummocks to see where seals are to be found, or to scent a dead whale from afar. He is an inveterate seal-hunter, chasing them in the water or out of it with equal ease and great cunning, though they are quick too, and often escape him just when he thinks he has caught them. It is when they are asleep with their noses upon the ice or the land, that he has his best chance, for then he will swim warily behind them, coming up close, till, even if they wake, they have no choice but to be killed where they are, or to leap out on the solid ice where he will soon overtake them.

The polar bear, unlike his brown cousins, fishes and hunts all the winter through, and it is only the mothers which take refuge in caves hollowed out of the snow, where their little ones are born in early spring, and nestle down by her side in their icy home. And when the cubs can run, both father and mother care for them with true devotion, defending them against all attacks, and pushing them before them when pursued, even going so far as to take them in their teeth and swim away with them when they cannot otherwise save them.

So we see that the polar bear has become more than half a water-animal, and gives us the first hint that some milk-givers may take to a thoroughly sea life. Neither among the wolves nor the felines do we find any animals taking entirely to the water; but in the weasel family, which comes near to the bears, we have the otters, and among the bears themselves their polar cousin, which reminds us that there is another great division of flesh-feeders which we must study in the next chapter—the walruses, seals, and sea-bears, the porpoises, dolphins, and whales, which with finned paddles have struck out quite a new line of life, and imitated the fish so well that they are often wrongly classed among them.

--- EUROPE IN THE AGE OF ICE

CHAPTER XI. HOW THE BACKBONED ANIMALS HAVE RETURNED TO THE WATER, AND LARGE MILK-GIVERS IMITATE THE FISH.

“On revient toujours à ses premiers amours,” says the French song. But who would have thought that, after rising step by step above the fish, and tracing the history of the backboned animals through

their development in the air and over the land, till we brought them to a stage of intelligence second only to man, we should have to follow them back again to the water and find the highly gifted milk-givers taking on the form and appearance of fishes? Nevertheless it is so, for seals and whales are as truly flesh-eating milk-givers as bears and wolves; nor are they much behind them in intelligence, for we all know how teachable and affectionate seals and sea-lions are, while what little is known of the life of whales shows that they are devoted mothers, and their well convoluted though small brains are a proof that they are by no means wanting in intelligence.

Yet the whales and dolphins, at any rate, have not only adopted a sea life, but have limbs so like a fish’s fins that we can scarcely call them by any other name, and they are so completely water animals that they cannot even return to the land.

Now we should be quite puzzled to account for such curious forms as these warm-blooded animals, half transformed into fish, if it were not that we know of several land animals belonging to different groups which have gone part of the way towards a fish life. Thus among the reptiles we have the oceanic turtles and the sea snakes; among birds the penguins, whose wings have almost become fins. Then among the milk-givers we have the web-footed Duck-billed Platypus, the Yapock or web-footed opossum of South America, the Desman and the Beaver, the Polar Bear, and last but not least the Otters, web-footed animals nearly allied to the weasels, which seek their food entirely in the water.

The common Otter of Europe and America though he moves quickly and actively on land, has webbed toes with only short claws standing out beyond the swimming foot, and he spends the greater part of his life in the river, making his home in a hollow of the bank beneath the overhanging roots of trees. There he may still be seen in many of our English rivers, his soft brown fur shining as he swims along, diving under water for a fish, which he brings out on to the bank to eat, holding it in his fore paws.

But there is an otter which has deserted the old land life much more completely than this, for the great Sea-Otters of the North Pacific, about four or five feet long (see Fig. 79), never care even to come on shore, but, when they have dived for their prey, turn on their backs and float while they eat it, holding the sea-urchins, crabs, or fish, in their front paws. They even nurse their young ones in the same fashion, dandling them in their arms as they lie face upwards on the sea; and they rear them entirely on the thick beds of kelp off the coasts of the North Pacific Ocean, never bringing them on land.

These sea-otters may be seen in hundreds off the coasts of Alaska and California, basking on the wet rocks, playing, leaping, and plunging in the water, till some alarm makes each mother seize her little one in her teeth and dive under in an instant.

They are twice the size of the River Otter, and in many points more like seals, for though their front paws are short and cat-like, their hind feet are flat flippers, with a long outer toe; their face too is broad and short, and their teeth are neither cutting like the weasels nor flattened like the bears, but covered with rounded knobs, well fitted for crushing crab-shells and the bones of the fish on which they feed.

Fig. 79.

Sea-Otter.[180]—(From Wolf.)

Showing the front paws, and the hind webbed feet.

We see, then, that it is quite possible for land-animals to have near relations specially adapted for a sea life. But the otter is still distinctly a four-footed creature, with free arms and legs, and we can trace his connection with the weasel tribe. It is quite different with the three groups of real fin-footed animals—the Seals and Walruses, the Manatees, and the Whales. Though we can trace their likeness bone by bone to the land animals, yet they have become so different as to show that they must have branched off long long ago; so long indeed that we cannot even guess at the

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