21 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



egg. The nearest young fellow nimbly slips into the nest, and keeps 

 the egg suitably warm till the mother returns. Shall he not also have 

 a little satisfaction when others are sipping the joys of life in full 

 draughts ? There are no orphans among the auks. If a pair happen 

 to die, the young fellows will hatch the ^^g out, or, if the chick is 

 already hatched, they will take care of it. The early instruction of 

 the chick is a matter of patience, time, and trouble. As soon as it is 

 dry, the parents take it to a cliff by the sea-shore and spring down, 

 while the young one remains standing above and not knowing what 

 to do in his helpless condition. The old ones call, but he does not 

 follow, for he is afraid of the leap and of the strange element. Father 

 and mother repeat the leap again and again, and encourage the timid 

 one. The young bird follows at last, not venturing upon the leap, 

 but in a kind of desperate mood letting himself fall. As soon as he 

 has touched the swinging wave he feels at home, and begins to swim 

 bravely, the parents keeping by him, so as to give him rest on their 

 backs when he is tired. 



A quite different spectacle is presented by those mountains which 

 are principally inhabited by a particular species of gull. To observe 

 one of them I made a special excursion into Lapland. I had at the 

 time a design of writing a book on the life of birds, and had read in 

 some work about three-toed gulls that nested in the bird-mountains in 

 such multitudes " that they darkened the sun when they rose, com- 

 pletely covered the mountain when they sat down upon it, deafened 

 the ears when they screeched, and turned the verdure-clad rocks white 

 where they were sitting." There are only three such mountains known 

 — one in Lapland, one in Iceland, and one in Greenland. The one in 

 Lapland, which is much the most remarkable, lies out of the course of 

 the steamer, and we were therefore obliged to charter a special boat to 

 reach it. A storm compelled us to go into a harbor of refuge. When 

 the tempest had abated, about midnight, we continued our voyage. 

 The waves were still high, and single gulls shot before and around us 

 like dazzling white flashes. All at once, at Cape Svaerholm, not far 

 from the North Strait, there rose before us a great black cliff. It 

 looked like a large marble table covered with millions of little white 

 points that shone like stars. We fired a shot at them, when, as soon 

 as the report had ceased, these became living birds, pure white gulls, 

 and sunk in a few minutes hastily down to the sea in so compact a 

 throng that I might have thought a snow-storm had broken loose and 

 was pouring its immense flakes down from the sky. For a few minutes 

 it snowed birds as far as one could see. The surge rolled wild, but it 

 was the euphonious accompaniment of the rustling of the wings and of 

 the shrieks of the frightened sea-birds. As far as the eye could reach 

 the waves were covered with the foam-born children of the sea, and the 

 cliff and the mountain were as white-dotted as before. Yet these were 

 only the males, which had rushed away on the approach of danger. 



