104. MAMMALS

three families—the O¢ardide, or eared seals; the
Trichechide, or walruses; and the Phoczde, or earless
seals, the last having their hind limbs stretched out
behind, while the other two families have them so
arranged as to be capable of being turned forward
and used on land as ordinary feet and legs.

The eared seals are the sea-lions and sea-bears,
the fur-seals, the seals of the sealskin jackets, which,
in the more restricted sense, are not seals at all but
more or less of a remove from the otters, or, rather,
divergent branches from a common ancestor, that
have attained a somewhat similar fitness for some-
what similar conditions.

The walrus, or sea-horse (Scandinavian Valross—
that is, ‘ whale-horse’), isan immense fellow, weighing,
perhaps, two hundred stone. Really there are two
walruses—one in the Pacific, one in the Atlantic—
with well-marked differences. Both rank high among
the monsters of the deep. Fifteen or twenty feet
long, and even longer, armed with two huge canine
teeth, sometimes measuring thirty inches from point
to socket, with which to climb the ice-floes or drag
the weeds and molluscs from the rocks—-teeth which
furnish no small proportion of our commercial ivory
—he is a gallant victim of civilisation, and fights for
his life as boldly and determinedly as any animal
hunted by man. At one time so numerous that they
would completely clothe the surface of a floe and
bring it down to the water’s edge, sprawling on it in
their hundreds, each with his head and shoulders on
his neighbour’s back, these sea-horses are now be-
coming comparatively scarce, except in a few feebly-