Note 124 — Chapter X · AMPHIBIAN MILLIONS. (continued 2)

If there is any one faculty better developed than the others in the brain of the intelligent Callorhinus, it must be its “bump” of locality. The unerring directness with which it pilots its annual course back through thousands of miles of watery waste to these spots of its birth—small fly-dots of land in the map of Bering Sea and the North Pacific—is a very remarkable exhibition of its skill in navigation. While the Russians were established at Bodega and Ross, Cal., seventy years ago, they frequently shot fur-seals at sea when hunting the sea-otter off the coast between Fuca Straits and the Farallones. Many of these animals, late in May and early in June, were so far advanced in pregnancy that it was deemed certain by their captors that some shore must be close at hand upon which the near-impending birth of the pup took place. Thereupon the Russians searched over every rod of the coast-line of the mainland and the archipelago between California and the peninsula of Alaska, vainly seeking everywhere there for a fur-seal rookery. They were slow to understand how animals so close to the throes of parturition could strike out into the broad ocean to swim fifteen hundred or two thousand miles within a week or ten days ere they landed on the Pribylov group, and, almost immediately after, give birth to their offspring.