Great as it is, yet a short schedule[107] embraces the titles of all the pinnipeds found in, on, and around the island-group. Of this list the hair-seal[108] is the animal which has done so much to found that erroneous popular and scientific opinion as to what a fur-seal appears like. _Phoca vitulina_ has, in this manner, given to the people of the world a false idea of its relatives. It is so commonly distributed all over the littoral salt waters of the earth, seen in the harbors of nearly every marine port, or basking along the loneliest and least inhabited of desolate coasts far to the north, that everybody has noticed it, if not in life, then in its stuffed skins at the museums, sometimes very grotesquely mounted. This copy, set everywhere before the eye of the naturalist, has rendered it so difficult for him to correctly discriminate between the _Phocidæ_ and the _Otariidæ_, that the synonymy of the _Pinnipedia_ has been expanded until it is replete with meaningless description and surmise. Although the hair-seal belongs to the great group of pinnipeds, yet it does not have even a generic affinity with those seals with which it has been so persistently grouped, namely, the fur-seal and the sea-lion. It no more resembles them, than does the raccoon a black or grizzly bear. I shall not enter into a detailed description of this seal; it is wholly superfluous, for excellent, and, I believe, trustworthy accounts have been repeatedly published by writers who have treated of the subject as it was spread before their eyes on the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and Greenland; to say nothing of the researches and notes made by European scientists. It differs completely in shape and habit from its congeners on these islands. Here, where I have studied its biology, it seldom comes up from the water more than a few rods at the farthest; generally hauling and resting at the margin of the surf-wash. It takes up no position on land to hold and protect a family or harem, preferring the detached water-worn rocks, especially those on the lonely north shore of St. Paul, although I have seen it resting at “Gorbatch,” near the sea-margin of the great seal-rookery of that name, on the Reef Point of St. Paul; its cylindrical, supine, gray and white body marked in strong contrast with the erect, black, and ochre-colored forms of the _Callorhinus_, which swarmed round about it. On such small spots of rock, wet and isolated from the mainland, and in secluded places of the north shore, the “nearhpah” brings forth its young, a single pup, perfectly white, covered with long woolly hair, and weighing from three to seven pounds. This pup grows rapidly, and after the lapse of four or five months it tips the scales at fifty pounds; by that time it has shed its infant coat and donned the adult soft steel-gray hair over the head, limbs, and abdomen, with its back most richly mottled and barred lengthwise, by dark brown and brown-black streaks and