THE GANNET'S ANATOMY 521 



the Bustard, the Emu, and the Pehcan,* there have been 

 various speculations as to what the air -sacs or cells are 

 for, the truth probably being that in different birds they 

 serve different ends. Probably in none of the above- 

 mentioned species are the functions of the air-sacs the 

 same as in the Gannet ; but of this more presently. 



In the Gannet the subcutaneous air-cells are those which 

 first, and more especially, attract our attention. It is a little 

 singular that the curiosity of no scientific man had been 

 excited about them before the time of Francis Willughby. 

 It was Willughby, who may be styled the father of British 

 Ornithology, who detected the air-cells of the Gannet, and he 

 probably thought them unique in bird-anatomy ; nor was 

 he far wrong. It is true that the enquiring mind of William 

 Harvey, Charles the First's physician, was drawn to investi- 

 gate the air-sacs in some birds, but not the subcutaneous 

 cells of the Gannet. It was Willughby who, after dissecting 

 one picked up in Warwickshire, wrote . " Cutis laxe admo- 

 dum carni adhseret,"! and it was Montagu who, in 1811, 

 first described these air-cells fully, though he did not quite 

 reahze their meaning. 



* In two examples of Pelecanus onocrotalus which I examined in Egypt 

 in 1875, the air-sacs were very much in evidence, forming a thick mass 

 of loose subcutaneous tissue, which not only covered the whole of the 

 body, but even reached to the wings. 



t "See " Ornithologia," p. 2-17. Harvey excepted, the first exponent 

 of })irds' air-sacs in England was John Himter {see "Philosophical Trans.," 



