The Middlebury Register

The Walrus.

The walrus is a select and aristocratic beast, inasmuch as he is the sole representative of the genus Trichecus, and has no plebeian relatives in the shape of subgenera and species to wound his family pride. He is found throughout the whole arctic zone, as far as it has been explored, but he is chiefly hunted in the neighborhood of Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen, where the submarine banks which he delights to rake for the mollusks on which he feeds, lie comparatively near the surface of the water. He is not a graceful nor pleasing beast in appearance, since he somewhat resembles an enormous pig, with coarse whiskers, a pair of huge tusks depending from the upper jaw, flippers instead of legs, and no tail whatever. A full grown walrus weighs from 2500 to 3000 pounds, and his skin, blubber, and tusks constitute his attractions in the eyes of the hunter.

Mr. James Lamont, a British yachtsman, who has enjoyed a great deal of acute and satisfactory misery in hunting the walrus and other arctic animals, holds that the polar bear is the progenitor of the walrus. He supposes that, ages ago, enterprising bears became addicted to shell-fish hunting in shallow water. By constantly raking the mud with their teeth, and thus catching and swallowing shell-fish without wasting time by picking them up with their claws, they gradually developed a pair of upper canine teeth of enormous size. As their manner of life obliged the bears to spend most of their time in swimming, they wisely laid aside their legs and substituted flippers, at the same time abandoning the purely foppish habit of wearing an entirely useless tail.

Thus, in Mr. Lamont's opinion, the walrus is merely an improved polar bear, fitted with the necessary apparatus for successfully hunting shell-fish. That the rest of the bears still cling to their ursine peculiarities is, of course, due to their stupid conservatism, and there is really no excuse to be made for them.

This ingenious genesis of the walrus is not, however, to be accepted as a demonstrated fact. Mr. Lamont himself proposes it only in the guise of a plausible hypothesis. Every man has an inalienable right to make all sorts of hypothesis, and those who do not agree with Mr. Lamont have no right to call him hard names, as he is inclined to think they will. Less excusable is the conduct of that eminent naturalist whose name will be forever associated with his discovery of those surprising beasts, the slithytove, the mome-rath and the jabberwock. He has impliedly asserted that the walrus cherishes a fondness for carpenters, in whose company he is accustomed to walk along the beach, looking for oysters, and discussing the comparative merits of cabbages and kings. It is sufficient to say that not a single well authenticated case of the kind has ever been reported, and it is in the highest degree improbable that the walrus would engage in an argument concerning a vegetable like the cabbage, of the very existence of which he is in profound ignorance.

Though the walrus occasionally makes long voyages on cakes of floating ice, and has even been known to reach by this means the coast of Scotland, such journeys are never voluntarily undertaken. As he can not dive to any great depth, and as he seeks his food on the bottom of the sea, he is compelled to remain where the water is shallow. There is reason to suppose that the walrus is more abundant in higher latitudes than he is in the lower parallels where the hunters now seek him. Nature, in her manufactories at the north pole, is constantly turning out vast quantities of ice and walruses, which are carried by the arctic currents to regions where the vessels of the walrus-hunters can penetrate. It is certain that the walrus is gradually abandoning his most southerly haunts, and retreating northward before the attacks of his enemies. Formerly he frequented the Shetland Islands and the whole extent of the Norway coast, but at present he cannot be hunted with much success below the seventieth parallel.—[Harper's for October.