RELATIONS TO ANIMATE ENVIRONMENT 121 



for they have but a little short vvinfr, and they multiply so in- 

 finitely upon a certain flat Hand, that men drive them from 

 thence upon a boord, into their boates by hundreds at a time, as 

 if God had made the innocency of so poore a creature, to become 

 such an admirable instrument for the sustentation of man", 

 " How long," Mr. Saunders remarks, "this slaughter continued 

 it is impossible to say, but Auspach, writing in 18 19, speaks of 

 ' the Penguin ' as exterminated in that quarter." On Funk 

 Island these birds were discovered in 1534, and could then be 

 reckoned by thousands. For more than 200 years they were 

 subjected to a ceaseless persecution, till at last they were exter- 

 minated. On this island, it is said, it was the custom for the 

 crews of several vessels to spend the summer for the sole pur- 

 pose of killing " Gare-fowl " for the sake of their feathers. 

 Stone pens were erected into which the birds were driven like 

 sheep, to be slain by millions and their bodies left to rot where 

 they lay. 



As a British bird it appears to have been nowhere plentiful 

 during the two or three centuries of its existence. Earlier, 

 however, it must have been commonly used for food, inasmuch 

 as its bones occur in the kitchen-middens of Caithness and 

 Oronsay, and in a cave near Durham. Similarly, its bones occur 

 in kitchen-middens in Denmark. Hence we may suppose that 

 the cause of its extermination in this part of the world was the 

 same as that which culminated in extinction some hundreds of 

 years later in Newfoundland. The last Great Auk in Britain 

 was taken alive in Waterford Harbour in 1834. 



The Islands of Mauritius and Rodriguez furnish us with two 

 further illustrations of the work of extermination due to man's 

 handiwork. Mauritius was the home of a gigantic Pigeon — the 

 Dodo, a bird as large as a small swan, but absolutely in- 

 capable of flight. This combination of great stature with 

 flightlessness was the outcome of an abundance of food, and 

 the freedom from all necessity of procuring this food by flight, 

 or by resorting to the use of the wings for the purpose of avoid- 

 ing enemies. The atrophy of the wing had proceeded so far 

 when man entered into this paradise that it had become so 

 reduced as to be inferior in size to that of our common Rock 

 Pigeon. Thus pinioned, it was at the mercy of the invader ; 

 who, however, accomplished the work of destruction unwittingly. 



