100 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



nearest relatives are the hosts of little black and 

 white petrels or Mother Gary's chickens which 

 abound on every ocean and are familiar in storm 

 and calm. In fact it would not be far from the 

 truth were we to call petrels dwarf albatrosses, or 

 the latter giant petrels. Diversity in size is prob- 

 ably as great in this group of birds as in any cor- 

 responding assemblage of animals on the earth. 

 Within sight of one another I have collected an 

 albatross and a petrel, the former weighing one 

 hundred and fifty times as much as the latter, while 

 the albatross had a spread of wing seven times as 

 great as that of its tiny relative. There has been 

 much written of truth and of exaggeration in re- 

 gard to the wing spread of albatrosses. I am 

 inclined to agree with the words of Dr. Lucas, 

 who writes of the wandering albatross "it is also 

 the largest species, having a stretch of wings of 

 about twelve feet — an assigned dimension of seven- 

 teen and a half feet being either a great exaggera- 

 tion or highly exceptional." In the Eocene, how- 

 ever, there lived an albatross-like bird, which, 

 judged by the size of its fossil bones, must have had 

 a spread of wing of at least twenty-two feet. 



In birds so evidently related as petrels and al- 

 batrosses but differing so greatly in actual size we 

 have most interesting evidence of possibilities of 

 flight character. It would seem impossible for any 

 small bird to soar for any length of time or to go 

 for any distance without actually flapping. I can 

 recall no bird of small size which has this ability, 

 while such past-masters of non-flapping flight as 



