ill Iceland respecting the Gare-fowl. 397 



I aui sure, doomed to disappointment. That shore is almost 

 always beset with ice, and dive admirably as the bird may, I 

 have yet to learn that he can remain under water aa long as a 

 Seal or a Walrus. His then would be a poor sort of existence 

 among closely-packed floes and crashing mountains of ice. 

 Along the coast of Labrador nothing has been lately heard of 

 him that I know of, and yet, if I am rightly informed, it is 

 pretty generally every year visited by fishermen of various na- 

 tions. The formerly known breedmg-places in the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence and off" the coast of Newfoundland are ascertained to 

 be abandoned, and no wonder when we think of the annual mas- 

 sacres which used to be committed there *. Yet there may be 

 still " some happier island in the watery waste " to which the 

 Penguins of the western seas may have escaped ; but then, we 

 may rely upon it, there is left a scanty remnant only. 



I have been informed by my good friend Colonel Drummond- 

 Hay, that in December 1852, in passing over the tail of the 

 Newfoundland banks, he saw what he fully believes to have 

 been a Great Auk. At first he thought it was a Northern Diver ; 

 but he could see the large bill and white patches, which left no 

 doubt on his mind. The bird dived within thirty or forty yards 

 of the steamer. The same gentleman also has sent me a letter 

 received by him in 185J< from the late Mr. J. MacGregor, of St. 

 John^s, Newfoundland, in which he encloses a succinct account 

 of the former wanton destruction of these birds by the fishermen 

 — the heaps of bones and the '^ pounds ' now to be seen on some 

 of their old breeding- places — and states that in the preceding 

 year (1853) a dead one was picked up in Trinity Bay. My in- 



* I am under the necessity of dissenting from the opinion expressed by 

 Professor Owen, in a lecture deUvered at the Royal Institution. April 12, 

 1859, and repeated in his article on ' Palaeontology,' as republished in a 

 separate form from the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica' (p. 400). To the de- 

 struction which the Great Auk has experienced at the hands of man, must, 

 I am confident, its gradually increasing scarcity be attributed. Granting 

 that it does require very peculiar breediug-places to be fit and favourable 

 for it, we only know of the disappearance of one such in the whole extent of 

 its range, which in comparatively modern times reached from Cape Cod to 

 Papa Westra, while on every other known breeding-place it has, from tlie 

 earliest date, been the especial object of search. 



