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a favourite rendezvous for these amphibious multitudes. There they have often been seen congregated to the number of from five hundred to a thousand;. nor at the period of my visit had they yet ceased to frequent it, although the suspicious appearance of two or three tents, a large caldron with a fire under it, and half-a-dozen upright and ever watchful bipeds, armed with clubs, might have convinced any reasonable brutes that the place was no longer to be approached with safety. But perhaps, like more reasoning animals, they could not resist the force of habit, although obviously at the risk of self destruction. In brief, a party of sealers, a specimen of the hardy and indefatigable race of South Sea adventurers, inured to every hardship, and, from the nature of their avocations, ruthless and merciless, had, a few weeks pre vious to my visiting Trowbridge Shoal, formed an esta blishment thereon, for the purpose of carrying on a war of extermination against the unoffending phocae. It is the practice of these exterminators to surround their victims, when assembled on the sand-bank, by stealthily creeping round them, armed with enormous clubs. At a given signal they advance simultaneously upon the herd, uttering loud shouts, on hearing which the animals huddle together in alarm, a few only attempting resist ance. Then commences a scene of indiscriminate mas sacre : the assailants, with their ponderous clubs, deal round fatal blows, aimed at the noses of the animals, which are exceedingly sensitive, by which means they become stupified with pain, and are rendered incapable of flight or resistance. Among phocae, as among other gregarious animals there is always an individual distinguished by superior