HISTORICAL PREFACE xxiii. 



was in this instance taken from an unmistakeable Gannet 

 not quite adult. 



Finally, we come to the best told story of all — save for 

 some exaggeration in regard to numbers — Martin Martin's 

 " A Late Voyage to St. Kilda," an island then almost 

 unknown, where the Gannet was a staple article of food. 

 The five or six-times reprinted narrative of this expe- 

 dition, which was in 1697, ought to have made many 

 English readers familiar with the name of Solan Goose, but 

 it does not seem to have done so. That the discoveries, 

 for such they may be termed, of Martin, who was a native 

 of the Island of Skye {see p. 118), should be unknown to 

 foreign scientists like the illustrious BufEon (1770-83) is 

 not surprising, but that our own countrymen, Latham, 

 Montagu, Selby, Macgilhvray, Yarrell, and Saunders 

 should pass them unnoticed is very singular. 



In John Walker's " Essays on Natural History " (1808) 

 there are some good notes which, like the observations of 

 Martin, have been overlooked by English writers, if not 

 by his own countrymen. Passing over Pennant's " British 

 Zoology " (1766 and 1768), and a few allusions in the same 

 author's "Tour in Scotland" (1771), to Gannets, there is 

 nothing which calls for remark in Latham's " Synopsis " 

 (Vol. III. 1785, Supplement 1787), or in the same author's 

 " General History of Birds " 1821-8 ; but to George Montagu 

 belongs the credit of describing the Gannet's remarkable 

 subcutaneous air-cells (" Supplement to The Ornithological 

 Dictionary," 1813). Strange to say, although a Devon- 

 shire man, he did not know of the existence of the Gannetrj^ 

 on Lundv Island ; but he lived in South Devon, which 



