th to their young.

The Weddell seal is black on top, and splashed with silver in other
places. He measures up to 10 feet from nose to tail, eats fish, is
corpulent and hulking. He sometimes carries four inches of blubber. On
the ice he is one of the most sluggish of God's creatures, he sleeps
continually, digests huge meals, and grunts, gurgles, pipes, trills and
whistles in the most engaging way. In the sea he is transformed into one
of the most elastic and lithe of beasts, catching his fish and swallowing
them whole. As you stand over his blow-hole his head appears, and he
snorts at you with surprise but no fear, opening and shutting his
nostrils the while as he takes in a supply of fresh air. It is clear that
they travel for many miles beneath the ice, and I expect they find their
way from air-hole to air-hole by listening to the noise made by other
seals. Some of the air-holes are exit and entrance holes as well, and I
found at least one seal which appeared to have died owing to its opening
freezing up. They may be heard at times grinding these holes open with
their teeth (Ponting took some patient cinematographs showing the process
of sawing the openings to these wells) and their teeth are naturally much
worn by the time they become old. Wilson states that they are liable to
kidney trouble: their skin is often irritable, which may be due to the
drying salt from the sea; and I have seen one seal which was covered with
a suppurating rash. Their spleens are sometimes enormously enlarged when
they first come out of the sea on to the ice, which is interesting
because no one seems to know much about spleens. Speculation was caused
amongst us by the fact that some of these air-holes had as it were a
trap-door above them. One day I was on the ice-foot at Cape Evans at a
time when North Bay was frozen over with about an inch or more of ice. A
seal suddenly poked his nose up through this ice to get air, and when he
disappeared a slab which had been raised by his head fell back into this
trap position. Clearly this was the origin of the door.

Weddell seals and the Hut Point life are inextricably mixed up in my
recollections of October. Atkinson, Debenham, Dimitri and I went down to
Hut Point on the 12th, with the two dog-teams. We were to run two depots
out on to the Barrier, and Debenham, whose leg prevented his further
sledging, was to do geological work and a plane table survey. Those of us
who had borne the brunt of the