This seal is rather a formidable animal when it is enraged, for it is quite large when fully grown, and uses both its claws and its teeth in fighting. The male animals are very quarrelsome among themselves, and most desperate battles take place. These and other hair-seals lie in summer upon floating ice-fields where their young are born. Steamers filled with men find them off the coast of Labrador, land on the ice, and kill thousands for the sake of their skins and the oil tried out of the blubber or underlying fat. THE SEA-ELEPHANT One of the biggest of all the seals is the great sea-elephant, also called elephant-seal, which frequents the shores of many of the islands in the Antarctic Ocean. It owes its name partly to its enormous size, the old males sometimes reaching a length of eighteen or even twenty feet, and partly to its very curious trunk, which is sometimes as much as a foot long. In the females and the young animals this trunk is wanting, and even in the male it is seldom seen unless the animal is excited, when it can be blown out very much like the bag of the hooded seal. The fur of the sea-elephant is much too coarse to be of any great value. But its skin can be made into excellent leather, while the thick coat of blubber which lies beneath it furnishes large quantities of useful oil. The consequence is that the animal has been much hunted, and is now comparatively scarce even in districts where it was once very common. It is not nearly so fierce as the hooded seal, and almost always takes to flight if it is attacked, its huge body quivering like a vast mass of jelly as it shuffles awkwardly along over the beach. But the males fight most fiercely with one another, inflicting really terrible wounds by means of their tusk-like teeth. THE WALRUS The strangest of all the seals is the walrus, whose tusks, representing the canine teeth, are sometimes as much as two feet long. This animal is found only in the northern parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and is not often seen outside the arctic circle. Formerly it was far more widely distributed, and in the Atlantic was even seen frequently as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence; but it has been so persecuted by hunters that it has quite disappeared from many districts where once it was in great numbers.