Then, again, this is perhaps the only place in all Alaska where man, primitive and civilized, is not cursed by mosquitoes. There are none here. A gnat, that is disagreeably suggestive of the real enemy just referred to, flits about in large swarms, but it is inoffensive, and seeks shelter in the grass. Several species of beetles are also numerous here. One of them, the famous green and gold “carabus,” is exceedingly common, crawling everywhere, and is just as bright in the rich bronzing of its wing-shields as are its famous prototypes of Brazil. One or two species of _Itemosa_, a _Cymindis_, several representatives of the _Aphidiphaga_, one or two of _Dytiscidæ_, three or four _Cicindelidæ_—these are nearly all that I found. A single dragon-fly, _Perla bicaudata_, flitted over the lakes and ponds of St Paul. The familiar form to our eyes, of the bumble-bee, _Bombus borealis_, passing from flower to flower, was rarely seen; but a few are here resident. The _Hydrocorisæ_ occur in great abundance, skipping over the water in the lakes and pools everywhere, and a very few species of butterflies, principally the yellow _Nymphalidæ_, are represented by numerous individuals. Aside from the seal-life on the Pribylov Islands, there is no indigenous mammalian creature, with the exception of the blue and white foxes, _Vulpes lagopus_,[92] and a lemming, _Myodes obensis_. The latter is restricted, for some reason or other, to the Island of St. George, where it is, or at least was, in 1874, very abundant. Its burrows and paths, under and among the grassy hummocks and mossy flats, checkered every square rod of land there covered with this vegetation. Although the Island of St. Paul is but twenty-nine or thirty miles to the northwest, not a single one of these active, curious little animals is found there, nor could I learn from the natives that it had ever been seen there. The foxes are also restricted to these islands; that is, their kind, which are not found elsewhere, except the stray examples on St. Matthew seen by myself, and those which are carefully domesticated and preserved at Attoo, the extreme westernmost land of the Aleutian chain. These animals find comfortable holes for their accommodation and retreat on the Seal Islands, among the countless chinks and crevices of the basaltic formation. They feed and grow fat upon sick and weakly seals, also devouring many of the pups, and they vary this diet by water-fowl and eggs[93] during the summer, returning for their subsistence during the long winter to the bodies of seals upon the breeding-grounds and the skinned carcasses left upon the killing-fields. Were they not regularly hunted from December until April, when their fur is in its prime beauty and condition, they would swarm like the lemming on St. George, and perhaps would soon be obliged to eat one another. The natives, however, thin them out by incessant trapping and shooting during the period when the seals are away from the islands.