is equipped with most
formidable teeth with which it tears strips out of the still living
birds, and flippers which are adapted entirely for speed in the water. It
is a solitary animal with a large range of distribution. It has been
supposed to bring forth its young in the pack, but nothing definite is
known on this subject. One day we saw a big sea-leopard swimming along
with the ship. He dived under the floes and reappeared from floe to floe
as we went, and for a time we thought he was interested in us. But soon
we sighted another lying away on a floe, and our friend in the water
began to rear his head up perpendicularly, and seemed to be trying to
wind his mate, as we supposed. He was down wind from her, and appeared to
find her at a distance of 150 to 200 yards, and the last we saw of him he
was heading up the side of the floe where she lay.

There are four kinds of seal in the Antarctic; of one of these, the
sea-leopard, I have already spoken. Another is called the Ross seal, for
Sir James Ross discovered it in 1840. It seems to be a solitary beast,
living in the pack, and is peculiar for its "pug-like expression of
countenance."[61] It has always been rare, and no single specimen was
seen on this expedition, though the Terra Nova must have passed through
more pack than most whalers see in a life-time. It looks as if the Ross
seal is more rare than was supposed.

[Illustration: A SEA LEOPARD]

[Illustration: A WEDDELL SEAL]

The very common seal of the Antarctic is the Weddell, which seldom lives
in the pack but spends its life catching fish close to the shores of the
continent, and digesting them, when caught, lying sluggishly upon the
ice-foot. We came to know them later in their hundreds in McMurdo Sound,
for the Weddell is a land-loving seal and is only found in large numbers
near the coast. Just at this time it was the crab-eating seal which we
saw very fairly often, generally several of them together, but never in
large numbers.

Wilson has pointed out in his article upon seals in the Discovery
Report[62] that the Weddell and the crab-eater seal, which are the two
commoner of the Antarctic seals, have agreed to differ both in habit and
in diet, and therefore they share the field successfully. He shows that
"the two penguins which share the same area have differentiated in a
somewhat similar manner." The Weddell seal and the Emperor penguin "have
the following points in common, namely, a littoral distrib