There is, however, another reason why bears keep among hummocks and pack-ice--namely, that near such spots water usually first makes its appearance in the summer. Seals, consequently, are most numerous there; while the inequalities of the floe afford shelter to the bears in approaching their prey. During summer the colour of the Polar bear is of a dull yellowish hue, closely resembling that of decaying snow or ice. The fur is then thin, and the hair on the soles of their feet almost wholly rubbed off, as with the other animals of Arctic climes; but in the autumn, when the body has recovered from the privations of the previous winter, and a thick coating of blubber overlays his carcass to meet the exigencies of another season of scanty fare, the feet, as the season advances, are beautifully incased and feathered with hair, and the animal’s colour usually turns to a very pale straw, which, from particular points of view, as the light strikes it, looks white, or nearly so. The nose and lips are of a jetty black; the eyes vary in colour. Brown is common, but some have been seen with eyes of a pale gray. Their sense of smell is peculiarly acute, facilitated no doubt by the peculiar manner in which the pure keen air of the North carries scent to very considerable distances. Sherard Osborn states that bears have been seen to follow up a scent, exactly as dogs would do; and the floes about Lowther Island, in 1851, looked as if the bears had quartered there in search of seals, after the fashion of a pointer in the green fields of England. The snorting noise which they make as they approach near indicates how much more confidence they place in their scent than in their vision; though both, when the hunter is concerned, are apt to deceive them. The Polar bear attains to very formidable proportions; but when seamen speak of monsters fifteen feet in length, their auditors may be excused for withholding their belief. _Ten_ feet would seem to be a maximum; and the bear need be large, strong, and muscular to master the large Arctic seal, especially the saddle-back and bladder-nose species. For though it swims well and dives well, it neither swims nor dives as well as the seal, and would therefore have but little chance of obtaining a sufficient livelihood if it could not attack and capture its victim on the ice-floes. The seal, on the other hand, fully aware of its danger, and of the only means of escaping from it, always keeps close to the water, whether it be the hole it has gnawed and broken through the ice, or the open sea at the floe edge.