The Eared Seals (Otariadæ) form a distinct family from the Earless Seals (Phocidæ). They have more power of using their limbs like the more typical mammalia, walking on them with the body raised from the ground; they rest with their hind limbs bent forwards. These habits are well shown in Dr. Forster’s figures, engraved by Buffon; and they have been verified by the study of the living Eared Seal in the Zoological Gardens. Their scrotum and genital organs are exposed as in the Dog. The _Otariæ_ come to the surface during the process of mastication, and do not, like the Eared Seals, swallow under the water. They do not drink, while the common Seal occasionally sucks in water as a horse would. The pupils of the eyes dilate and contract to an enormous extent. The Sea-bears (_Otariadæ_) inhabit the more temperate and colder parts of the southern hemisphere, and the temperate and more northern regions of the Pacific Ocean. The _Otariæ_ appear to make periodical migrations towards the south; and the Sea-lions (_O. jubata_) come to the Falkland Islands in November, where they remain till June or July, when the greater number depart; but some remain there the whole year round (P. Z. S. 1869, p. 108). Navigators, from the general external resemblance of the animals, have regarded the Sea-lion and Sea-bear of the northern and southern regions as the same animal. Pennant (who paid considerable attention to Seals) and most modern zoologists have done the same. Nilsson, in his excellent Monograph of the Seals, only mentions three species of Eared Seal:—1, _Otaria jubata_; 2, _O. ursina_; and, 3, _O. australis_. He believed that the first was common to the Falkland Islands, Chile, Brazil, New Holland, and Kamtschatka, and the second to Magellan’s Straits, Patagonia, New Holland, and the Cape. We now know that the species have a very limited geographical distribution. When I published my ‘Catalogue of the Seals in the British Museum,’ in 1850, I was satisfied from Steller’s description that the species he described from the Arctic regions were distinct from those found in the Southern seas; and when I at last succeeded in obtaining specimens and skulls from the northern regions of the Pacific, I not only found that my idea was confirmed, but that they did not even belong to the same genera. I had the skulls of these species figured in the ‘Proceedings of the Zoological Society’ for 1859, and this greatly extended the knowledge of the animals. But there is yet much to be learnt respecting them. We do not know the species of Fur-seal described by Forster as inhabiting the coast of New Zealand.