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230 In spite of the shortness of all their four limbs, yet seals, as they stretch themselves, throw up the head, bend the neck and back, raise their fore-feet into the air, or push out the hind ones to their full length whilst at the same time stretching them apart, often have a very startling resemblance to a man. The curves and symmetries of the body—especially the upper portion of it—are sometimes wonderfully suggestive of the human torso, and the resemblance is often helped by the shape of the rock, which, by curving away from the body, allows the lines of it to appear. Nothing, in fact, can look both more like and more unlike a man than do these creatures. See one lying quiescent, a great, swollen, carrot-shaped bladder, and one may scoff at the possibility of any such resemblance; but wait and watch, and in a hundred odd ways one will catch it. When a seal scratches one of his front flippers it is wonderfully like a man scratching the back of one hand with the other. The hind feet can look almost more hand-like. It is true that when the toes are distended to their full width the whole foot is just like a fish's tail in shape, but when they are not stretched so widely apart, and those of the one play, as they often do, with those of the other, then they have a wonderful resemblance to fingers—swollen, gouty fingers, it is true; gloved, too, they look—but still fingers.

Another interesting sight now in the adjoining cove, or rather in the adjoining half of this semi-divided one! A seal comes to its rock there before