ESTIMATE OF THE NUMBER OF GANNETS 327 



population and that of certain other species. One hundred 

 and one thousand Gannets is a total which is certainly less 

 by tens of thousands than that of several sea-birds which 

 inhabit the same sort of places. Of that no one can have 

 much doubt. It is a total which must be considerably less 

 than that of the other two British members of the great 

 group of Steganopodes, viz., the Cormorant {Phalacrocorax 

 carbo (L.)), and the Shag (P. graculus (L.)), because the 

 distribution of the Cormorant extends over Asia and 

 Australia, while the Shag, though inhabiting a much smaller 

 area, is admittedly an abundant species ; on the other 

 hand, if we only take the British Isles, the numbers of the 

 Cormorant and the Shag respectively are, perhaps, not 

 very different from the Gannet, at any rate they are near 

 enough for comparison. If we allow that there are 76,000 

 Gannets in Great Britain and Ireland, as set forth in 

 the preceding table, — whether on sufficient authority or 

 not, the reader must judge, — it ought not to be too much 

 to guess the Cormorants at 80,000 and the more plentiful 

 Shags at 100,000. 



It has often been asked : What is the most abundant 

 species of bird in the world ? That, much as we should like 

 to know it, is a question impossible to answer. Some would 

 say the Sparrow [Passer domesticus (L.)) or the Skylark 

 {Alauda arvensis, L.). Charles Darwin thought it was 



