8 ALBATROS 



this pressure of the air against his wings with the force of gravity, 

 and by using his head and tail as bow and stern rudders, that the 

 Albatros is enabled to sail in any direction he pleases, so long as 

 his momentum lasts." Much discrepancy, at present inexplicable, 

 exists in the accounts given by various writers of the expanse of 

 Aving in this species. We may set aside as a gross exaggeration the 

 assertion that examples have been obtained measuring 20 feet, but 

 Dr. George Bennett of Sydney {JVanderings, &c., ii. p. 363) states that 

 he has " never seen the spread of the wings greater than fourteen 

 feet." Recently Mr. J. F. Green {Ocean Birds, p. 5) says that, out of 

 more than one hundred which he had caught and measured, the 

 largest was 1 1 feet 4 inches from tip to tip, a statement exactly con- 

 firmed, he adds, by the forty years' experience of a ship-captain who 

 had always made a point of measuring these birds, and had never 

 found one over that length. 



This Albatros is too well known by description in countless 

 books, or by specimens to be seen in almost any museum, to need 

 many words as to its chief features. In the adult the plumage of 

 the body is white, more or less mottled above by fine wavy bars, 

 and the quill-feathers of the wings are brownish-black. The young 

 are suffused with slaty-brown, the tint becoming lighter as the bird 

 gi-ows older. It is found throughout the Southern Ocean, seldom 

 occurring northward of lat. 30° S.,^ and is invariably met with by 

 ships that round the Cape of Good Hope or pass the Strait of 

 Magellan. As a species it is said to be less numerous than most of 

 its smaller congeners, and one cannot but fear that it will become 

 rarer still, if not extinct, partly because of the senseless slaughter to 

 which it is subjected by the occupants of almost every ship, but 

 especially because of the ravages inflicted upon it at its not too many 

 breeding-places, which are on islands mostly small and remote, where 

 disastrous havoc can be, and continually is, wrought by a boat's crew 

 in a few hours. 



In the North-Pacific Ocean are found two other large species of 

 Albatros, regarded for a long time by ornithologists as identical 

 vdth. D. exulans, but now recognized as being distinct species. 

 They have also been confounded with one another by some authors, 

 while the young have been described as if different from their 

 parents, so that their nomenclature presents a tangled puzzle which 

 it would be impossible here to unravel. Enough to say, that the 

 one of them which is most like B. exulans, and has over and over 

 again been so termed by authors, is the D. albatrus of Pallas, its 

 young being the D. derogata of Swinhoe. This seems to be always 



^ Instances are recorded of its occurrence in Europe and North America, and 

 no doubt examples of some species of Albatros have wandered so far from their 

 usual range ; but whether D. cxvlaiis is one of them seems to await proof. Fossil 

 remains of Diomcdea have been found in Suffolk {Q. J. Gcol. Soc. 1886, p. 367)- 



