Abstract
TEN years have only just elapsed since the Government of the United States of America obtained by treaty the territory of Alaska, including the seal islands situated off its coast in the Bering Sea, and at that time although the sealskin trade occupied thousands of hands, and had done so for at least a century previous, yet next to nothing was known of the animal producing the skins, and there was not, even in the museum of the Smithsonian Institution, a perfect skin and skeleton thereof. This state of things has happily now vanished, and through the joint action of Prof. Spencer Baird and the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Mr. Henry W. Elliott, was enabled to visit the Pribylov Islands in 1872, and we cannot but admire the zeal and energy which enabled him to reside in these dreary and desolate places all through the seasons of 1872 to 1874 inclusive. While a brief digest of Mr. Elliot's notes were published in 1874, it is only now that he has been enabled to publish a complete monograph on the subject, an emended copy of which, reprinted from the Report on the Fishery Industries of the Tenth Census at Washington in this year, is now before us. It forms a quarto volume of some 176 pages, and is illustrated by two maps and twenty-nine plates of subjects from the author's pencil. The writer's opportunities for observation, it will be noticed, were especially good. The previous observations of Stellar and others left much to be desired. The geographical distribution of the Arctic fur seal (Callorhinus) is very peculiar. In the Arctic waters of the Atlantic they have not been found, in the corresponding waters of the Pacific they are virtually confined to four islands in Bering's Sea, namely St. Paul and St. George of the tiny Pribylov group, and Bering and Copper Islands of the Commander group. On the former two they swarm. On the latter two, though the larger in area, the seals do not occur in such quantities. It seems impossible to avoid the reflection here as to the waste of fur seal life in the Antarctic regions, and along the coasts of South America, from which, as a centre, the Arctic forms, probably, originally came. Not a century ago the fur seals rested on the Falkland Islands in millions for hundreds that are to be found there now, and it seems hopeless to expect that a British parliament could, with all its many labours, trouble itself to frame regulations, such as the Russians and Americans have done, with the object of repeopling, even in time, these splendid breeding-grounds which, on the Falklands, lie in the very track of commerce, and which, unlike the Alaskan Islands, have beautiful and safe harbours.
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The Seal Islands of Alaska 1 . Nature 26, 199–201 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/026199a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/026199a0