82 THE GANNET 



a rock in the sea, in which those Solan Geese nestle and 

 breed ; in which also there be conies and wild Doves." 

 " Albanacks " were Puffins, but there is no such name 

 as " Tarnathan " known now, nor is it in the Gaelic 

 dictionary. The editor of " The Annals of Scottish Natural 

 History " plausibly suggests that " Tarnathans " were 

 Guillemots. 



7. Some of the historians of the eighteenth century, 

 as, for example, Sir Robert Sibbald (1710), J. Steyer 

 (1718), and Daniel Defoe (1722), allude to the Gannets 

 on Ailsa Craig, but have no first-hand information to 

 offer about them, apparently merely copying from previous 

 writers. 



8. The visit of Thomas Pennant, the author of 

 "The British Zoology," to Ailsa in 1772, some four years 

 after that book was written, perhaps hardly comes under 

 the denomination of early history. His ship lay two nights 

 by the Craig, of which he gives two pictures in his " Tour in 

 Scotland " (II., p. 215), but he tells us little about the birds ; 

 at that time the Craig was the property of the Earl of 

 Cassils,* who received £33 a year rent for it, which the 

 tenant must have partly paid out of the profits of his 



* Cassils, or Cassilis, one of the titles of the present Marquis of Ailsa, 

 before the creation of the marquisate. 



