The vitality of a fur-seal is simply astonishing. Its physical organization passes beyond the fabled nine lives of the cat. As a slight illustration of its tenure of life, I will mention the fact that one morning Philip came to me with a pup in his arms, which had just been born and was still womb-moist, saying that the mother had been killed at Tolstoi by accident, and he supposed that I would like to have a “choochil.” I took it up into my laboratory, and, finding that it could walk about and make a great noise, I attempted to feed it, with the idea of having a comfortable subject to my pencil for life-study of the young in varied attitudes of sleep and motion. It refused everything that I could summon to its attention as food, and, alternately sleeping and walking in its clumsy fashion about the floor; it actually lived nine days, spending the half of every one in floundering over the floor, accompanying all movements with a persistent, hoarse, blasting cry, and I do not believe it ever had a single drop of its mother’s milk. In a pup the head is the only disproportionate feature at birth when it is compared with an adult form, the neck being also relatively shorter and thicker. The eye is large, round, and full; but, almost a “navy blue” at times, it soon changes into the blue-black of adolescence. The females appear to go to and come from the water feeding and bathing quite frequently after bearing their young and an immediate subsequent coitus with the male: they usually return to the spot or its immediate neighborhood, where they leave their pups, crying out for them and recognizing the individual replies; though ten thousand around, all together, should blaat at once, they quickly single out their own and nurse them. It would certainly be a very unfortunate matter if the mothers could not identify their young by sound, since these pups get together like a great swarm of bees, and spread out upon the ground in what the sealers call “pods,” or clustered groups, while they are young and not very large; thus, from the middle or end of September until they leave the islands for the dangers of the great Pacific in the winter, along by the first of November, they gather in this manner, sleeping and frolicking by tens of thousands, bunched together at various places all over the islands contiguous to the breeding grounds, and right on them. A mother comes up from the sea, whither she has been to wash, and perhaps to feed, for the last day or two, feeling her way along to about where she thinks her pup should be—at least, where she left it last; but perhaps she misses it, and finds instead a swarm of pups in which it has been incorporated, owing to its great fondness for society. The mother, without first entering into a crowd of thousands, calls just as a sheep does for a lamb, and out of all the din she—if not at first, at the end of a few trials—recognizes the voice of her offspring, and