The fur-bearing seal is only one of many species belonging to the family. Some of them are very large animals, the largest being the great elephant-seal or sea-elephant, a creature which sometimes measures as much as thirty feet in length, and fifteen or eighteen feet round the largest part of the body, so that it is much larger and heavier than the real elephant. They are polygamous, like the animals we have just been speaking about; and it must be a still more wonderful thing to see such huge creatures fighting. This the males do with the greatest fury; but the first descriptive word upon our title-page receives a better illustration in the love and devotion which they show towards the females. They will not desert them when they are in any danger, and this fact, so much to their credit, is taken advantage of by the brutal seal-hunters, who attack the females first, and the males, who remain with them, afterwards. Were they to reverse the process of destruction, the harem belonging to any male that was killed would immediately take to the sea and disappear. Whilst he lives, however, they connect their safety with his presence, and so continue to crowd about him until he breathes his last. My authority for this statement is the Rev. J. G. Wood, but I have not been able to find anything bearing upon it in the accounts of those having personal experience of the habits of these animals, which I should have liked to have done. If true, then we have here a striking instance of affectionate solicitude in an animal, as contrasted with that callousness and deadness of sympathy on the part of man, which the slaughter of beasts always and necessarily produces. The sea-elephant is enormously fat, and the boiling of its fat down into oil, with the subsequent sale of this, is the industry with which its slaughter is connected. Some time ago this industry was not known, and some years hence it will have ceased with the life of the species. The world, therefore, will have gained nothing permanently by the oil, whereas it will have lost for ever an interesting and wonderful creature. The sea-elephant is a denizen of the southern seas, and used once to be very plentiful on the coast of California and Mexico. Now, however, owing to the persecution to which it has been subjected, one is scarcely ever to be seen there.