The following notes, surveys, and hypotheses herewith presented are founded upon the writer’s personal observations in the seal-rookeries of St. Paul and St. George, during the seasons of 1872 to 1874 inclusive, supplemented by his confirmatory inspection made in 1876. They were obtained during long days and nights of consecutive observation, from the beginning to the close of each seal-season, and cover, by actual surveys, the entire ground occupied by these animals. During the progress of heated controversies that took place pending the negotiation which ended in the acquisition of Alaska by our Government, frequent references were made to the fur-seal. Strange to say, this animal was so vaguely known at that time, even to scientific men, that it was almost without representation in any of the best zoölogical collections of the world; even the Smithsonian Institution did not possess a perfect skin and skeleton. The writer, then as now, an associate and collaborator of that establishment, had his curiosity very much excited by these stories; and in March, 1872, he was, by the joint action of Professor Baird and the Secretary of the Treasury, enabled to visit the Pribylov Islands for the purpose of studying the life and habits of these animals.[85] All writers on the subject of Alaskan exploration and enterprise agree as to the cause of the discovery of the Pribylov Islands in the last century. It was due to the feverish anxiety of a handful of Russian fur-gatherers, who desired to find new fields of gain when they had exhausted those last uncovered. Altasov and his band of Russians, Tartars, and Cossacks arrived at Kamtchatka toward the end of the seventeenth century, and they were the first discoverers of the beautiful, costly fur of the sea-otter. The animal bearing this pelage abounded then on that coast, but by the middle of the eighteenth century they and those who came after them had entirely extirpated it from that country. Then the survivors of Bering’s second voyage of observation, in 1741-42, and Tschericov brought back an enormous number of skins from Bering Island; then Michael Novodiskov discovered Attoo and the contiguous islands in 1745; Paicov came after him, and opened out the Fox Islands, in the same chain, during 1759; then succeeded Stepan Glottov, of infamous memory, who determined Kadiak in 1763; the peninsula of Alaska was discovered by Krenitzin in 1768. During these long years, from the discovery of Attoo until the last date mentioned above, a great many Russian companies fitted out at the mouth of the Amoor River and in the Okotsk Sea; they prospected therefrom this whole Aleutian archipelago in search of the sea-otter. There were, perhaps, twenty-five or thirty different companies, with quite a fleet of small vessels; and so energetic and thorough were they in their search and capture of the sea-otter that as early as 1772 and 1774 the catch in that group had dwindled from thousands and tens of