xxii. THE GANNET 



But, fortunately, there are journals preserved to us, 

 which contain items of value about the Gannet, or " Sey 

 guse," as it has been called, and the memoranda left in 

 these by such travellers as Sir William Brereton (1634) and 

 by such men of science as Bishop LesHe (1578), Harvey 

 (I65I), and Ray (1661), tell us much wliich we should 

 never have known without them. Besides the mention 

 of the Gannet by Ray in his " Itineraries," namely, 

 when he met with it off Godreve [Godrevy] Island 

 in 1662 {see p. 387), as he had done the year before at 

 the Bass Rock (p. 205), he and Willughby twice de- 

 scribed it in their " Ornithologiae Libri Tres " (1676), a 

 work which would have been lost to science but for Ray — 

 or Wray, as he at one time wrote his name — and which 

 has since proved a fertile source of information to mam^ 

 subsequent writers. The second of these descriptions, 

 however, which is taken from a bird sent to one of 

 the authors by Dr. Walter Needham (" Ornithologia," 

 p. 265, Enghsh edition, p. 348), was evidently not from a 

 Gannet at all, but apparently was drawn up from a Great 

 Skua {Megalestris catarrhactes). Here Ray drifts into a 

 further mistake by not realising that the Cornish Gannet 

 wliich he and Willughby had seen of? Godrevy in Cornwall, 

 and the Solan Goose of Scotland were one and the same bird. 

 It was an excusable error, but it brought on him the censure 

 of Walter Moyle (" Works," 1726, I., p. 424), and a milder 

 rebuke from Thomas Pennant (" British Zoology," II., 

 p. 617). Further back, in their joint " Ornithology," we 

 find a quoted description of " The Sula of Hoier," which, 

 though Ray felt doubtful about it (" Ornithology," p. 331), 



