6o Transactions of the [Sess. 



from the ships to the shore ; and we need not wonder that it has 

 been exterminated, especially when we remember that the female 

 birds only laid one ^^^ each year. 



For a long period the Great Auks, or Penguins as they were 

 called in the American locality, were so numerous that mariners 

 frequenting those seas depended upon them as the principal source 

 of provision for their ships ; and it is probably not much more than 

 a century since the merchants of Bonavista used to sell these birds 

 to the poor people by the hundred-weight instead of pork. 



Our knowledge of what were its breeding-places may be defec- 

 tive ; but it seems the following are historically well attested, — 

 viz., St Kilda, Faroe, and the three Garefowl Eocks off the coast of 

 Iceland. Then we have to go west to the east coast of North 

 America, where, in the neighbourhood of Newfoundland, it was met 

 with on Funk and many other islands, also on some of the islands 

 in the Bay of St Lawrence, and at Cape Breton ; while another 

 station on the same coast at which it probably occurred was Cape 

 Cod — and this seems to have been near the southern limit of the 

 region in which the bird lived. We find it gradually diminished 

 in numbers at all the American breeding-places, until, finally, early 

 in the present century, it altogether disappeared ; and although we 

 have one or two notices of its being observed in American waters 

 between the years 1830 and 1852, when the last notice occurs, it 

 does not appear that any of these occurrences are fully authenticated 

 by those who report them. In the European region it lingered a 

 few years longer ; and it is not difficult to recount its recorded occur- 

 rences during the present century, but we shall only refer to a few 

 of these. Its last authenticated occurrences in British waters are 

 as follows : Two specimens, a male and a female, were killed at 

 Papa-Westray, one of the Orkney islands, during the year 1812. 

 The skin of the female bird was so destroyed that it was unfit for 

 stufiing ; but that of the male bird is now in the British Museum, 

 and is the finest skin they possess. Early in the summer of 1821 

 a specimen was caught alive at St Kilda ; and coming into the 

 hands of Mr Maclellan, a tacksman of Glass or Scalpa, one of the 

 Northern Hebrides, it was by him given to the Eev. John Fleming, 

 D.D., minister of Flisk, afterwards Professor Fleming of the New 

 College, Edinburgh, on the eve of his leaving Glass in the yacht 

 of the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses, 18th August of that 

 year.^ This bird was fed on fresh fish, and allowed occasionally to 

 sport in the water, with a cord fastened to its leg to prevent escape. 

 Unfortunately it got away when the yacht was near the entrance 

 to the Firth of Clyde, as it was being allowed to take its usual 

 bath.^ There appears to be some evidence that this bird afterwards 



1 'ProceedingsoftheSociety of Antiquaries of Scotland,' vol. ii.,N. S.,p.441. 



2 ' Edinburgh Philosophical Journal,' vol. x., 1824. 



