takes
no sustenance of any kind; and although exceedingly fat when going to
rest, he comes forth in the spring-time as thin as a skeleton. The den
is usually a cave or hollow tree; or, failing this, a _lair_, which the
animal constructs for himself out of branches, lining it snugly with
leaves and moss.

The brown bear is a long-lived animal. Individuals have been known of
the age of fifty years. The cubs when first born are not much larger
than the puppies of a mastiff. The people of Kamtschatka hunt this
species with great assiduity, and obtain from it many of the comforts
and necessaries of life. The skins are used for their beds and
coverlets, for their caps, gloves, and boots. They manufacture from it
harness for their dogs. From the intestines they make masks for their
faces, to protect them from the glare of the sun; and they also use the
latter stretched over their windows as a substitute for glass. The
flesh and fat are among the most esteemed dainties of a Kamtschatkan
_cuisine_. Even the shoulder-blades are used as sickles for cutting
grass. The Laplanders, also--of whose cold country the brown bear is an
inhabitant--have a great esteem for this animal. They regard its
prowess as something wonderful, alleging that it has the strength of ten
men, and the sense of twelve! The name for it, in their language,
signifies the dog of God.

The _White_, or _Polar bear_, is, perhaps, the most interesting of the
whole family: not so much on account of his superior size--since the
brown and the grizzly are sometimes as large as he--but rather from his
singular habits, and the many odd stories told about him, dining the
last fifty years, by whalers and Arctic explorers.

To describe the appearance of the Polar bear would be superfluous.
Everybody has seen either a living individual in a menagerie, or a
stuffed skin of one in a museum; and the long, low, tail-less body--with
outstretched neck and sharp projecting snout--covered with a thick coat
of white hair, renders it impossible to mistake the Polar bear for any
other animal.

This quadruped is more of a _sea_ than _land_ animal. Sometimes, it is
true, he wanders inland for fifty miles or so; but this he does in
following the course of some river or marshy inlet, where he finds fish.
His usual haunts are along the icy shores of the Arctic Ocean, and the
numerous ice-bound islands of the great Polar Sea. There he roams about
over the frozen banks, or f