I shall not attempt to give an extended review of the story of "Matka and Kotik." I must satisfy myself and, I trust, incite the interest of the readers of THE ARENA, by sketching only an outline of the Saga of the Seal. The scene of the story is the Mist-Island, or, more properly, certain parts of the shore and headlands of that island whereon the seals pass an important part of their migratory life. From these coast lines they take to sea at certain seasons and swim away, generally to the south. Tolstoi Head is the point of observation from which Dr. Jordan begins his charming delineations of seal-life, and there he concludes the story; which, in the meantime, transforms itself into the pathos of sad separations and finally into the dumb tragedy of slaughter and death. The author gives character--human character--to his personages, discriminating them according to their natures into beings whose very names, notwithstanding the limited range of their faculties, bring us into intimate and profound sympathy with them. Old Atagh, the lordly sea-bull of the Tolstoi Mys, looms up grandly above the rest-- In shape and gesture proudly eminent. Matka, the wife, is an embodiment of her sex. Kotik is the child of her choice. All her offspring are veritable children: the uncles are uncles, the aunts are aunts, the cousins are cousins, and the rest are the rest. Even the "supers" appear in the nebulous names of the drama. The point of the "Tale of the Mist-Islands," the great lesson of it, is the horrid abuses and cruelties to which the seals have been subjected by the brutal fur-pirates who have thronged the Alaskan waters in the past two decades, and whose intolerable lust of slaughter and devastation has threatened the extinction of the fur-seal race. If the story of "Matka and Kotik" could be perused, as it should be, by the American people, the very mothers of the country would rise up against the piratical butchers of the Pribilofs, who would quail under their frown. Meanwhile, diplomacy drags its length, and official reports carry to Congressional Committees a vague statistical account of what has been done and is still doing in the Alaskan waters. I most heartily commend to all who are interested--and who is not?--in the fur-seal question and in the manner of its solution, Dr. Jordan's interesting little book. I have hardly ever seen a better piece of English than this. The author's style is admirable. I scarcely recall another book so monosyllabic and terse. Whoever commences to read "Matka and Kotik" will continue to the end. The story fascinates while it instructs. I dare say that Dr. Jordan, in the scientific sketches which are cunningly scattered in these paragraphs, is always correct.