THE WALRUS, OR MORSE.[208]--So far as looks are concerned, scarcely a more uninviting fellow can be conceived than this animal, which the Greenlanders and Eskimo call “Awŭk,” from its peculiar guttural cry. It is better known among our own countrymen as the Sea Horse, though naturalists more frequently prefer Walrus, or Morse, words respectively modified derivatives from the old Norse and Lapp languages. Its present range is a narrow belt girding Labrador, Hudson’s and Baffin’s Bays, and skirting the East Greenland coast towards Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla, and still farther stretching on to Behring’s Strait and the islands off Alaska. Certain writers are inclined to regard the animal found in the North Pacific as a different species from that inhabiting the North Atlantic seas; but on this head no very justifiable evidence is yet offered. Meantime, its geographical distribution, briefly defined, is the Arctic Circle. Here, thinned by its hereditary enemy, the Polar Bear on the land side, and stricken down wholesale by man seawards, the day of its extermination seems not far distant. The living Walrus, indeed, presents to us a solitary example of a family once more numerous and widespread, and doubtless coincident with a period when climate was different from that now existing where their fossil remains have been discovered. In the deposits of Virginia, on the American Continent, in the Suffolk crag, and possibly in contemporaneous beds around the neighbourhood of Antwerp, bones of Walruses allied to the present northern form have been dug up. But others, moreover, have been found which, from greater size and characteristic peculiarities, evidently belonged to at least two genera (_Trichechodon_ and _Alachtherium_) distinct from the Arctic animal. Thus, by degrees, the more massive representatives of the family Trichechidæ have died out, while the last of the descendants visibly diminish amongst the bergs of their secluded, ice-bound home. The Walrus of the present day is a creature which attains large dimensions. Elliott mentions a great fellow, shot in the Behring Sea, nearly 13 feet long, and with a girth of 14 feet; and he estimates the gross weight of an ordinary full-grown male at 2,000 lbs. Well have some likened the hide, which is of a tawny brown colour, to a tough, flexible coat of mail, which harpoon and even bullets penetrate with difficulty. In old age these creatures do not only become obese, shapeless masses, but their gnarled hide, scarred by tusk-marks, bullet, or harpoon wounds, gets blotchy, pustular, and hairless. This, with small, fierce, bloodshot eye, in marked contrast with that of the Seals, and formidable pair of tusks, gives it a ferocious and demoniacal look.