GREAT AUl<t. til 



Viduals might yet survive, year after year passes by without 

 the discovery of a living specimen. That the species was extin- 

 guished by the agency of man there can be httle doubt. Pro- 

 fessor Alfred Newton writes in his " Dictionary of Birds " : — 

 " In Iceland there is the testimony of a score of witnesses, 

 taken down from their lips by one of the most careful naturalists 

 who ever lived, the late John Wolley, that the latest survivors 

 of the species were caught and killed by expeditions expressly 

 organised wdth the view of supplying the demands of caterers 

 to the various museums of Europe. In like manner the fact is 

 incontestable that its breeding-stations in the western part of 

 the Atlantic were for three centuries regularly visited and 

 devastated with the combined objects of furnishing food or bait 

 to the fishermen from very early days ; and its final extinction, 

 foretold in 1792 by Cartwright ('Labrador,' iii. p. 55), was 

 due, according to Sir Richard Bonnycastle {' Newfoundland, 

 in 1842,' i. p. 232) to 'the ruthless trade in its eggs and skin.' 

 No doubt that one of the chief stations of the species in Ice- 

 landic waters disappeared through volcanic action — 



'A land, of old upheaven from the abyss 

 By fire, to sink into the abyss again.' 



and that the destruction of the old Geirfuglaske'r drove some, 

 at least, of the birds which frequented it to a rock nearer the 

 mainland, when they were exposed to danger from which, in 

 their former abode, they had been comparatively free ; yet, on 

 this rock (Eldey = fire-island) they were 'specially hunted 

 down ' whenever opportunity offered, until the stock there was 

 wholly extirpated in 1844, and whether any remained else- 

 where must be deemed most doubtful." 



The Great Auk was a gigantic flightless Razor-bill, with such 

 small wings — only about the size of the ordinary Razor-bills — 

 that it was unable to fly. Bullock, who saw a specimen alive, 

 says that it was " wholly incapable of flight, but so expert a 

 diver that every effort to shoot it was ineffectual. '^ 



I. THE GREAT AUK. PLAUTUS IMPENNIS. 



A/ca impennis, Linn. Syst. Nat. i. p. 210 (1766); Macgill. 

 Brit. B. V. p. 359 (1852); Dresser, B. Eur. viii. p. 563, 



