480 THE NATURAL HISTORY EETIEW, 



reader's attention, and here, tliough their hopes may often have led 

 them to think otherwise, we can assure them they will find no h\nd 

 of promise. Since the beginning of the fifteenth centniy, when the 

 Danish colonies on the east coast of Greenland are supposed to 

 have been shut off from the mother-country, by a remarkable 

 change in the configuration of the polar ice (Scoresby, Arctic 

 Begions, i. pp. 262, 263), that part of the world has been seldom 

 visited, but on every occasion save one — the exceptional year, when 

 Scoresby made his remarkable survey of the portion extending north- 

 ward from lat. 69° N. — this coast has been found blockaded by ice, 

 so that even now, between lat. 65° N. and the southern limits of 

 Scoresby's exploration, it remains on our charts a complete blank. 

 M. Preyer has disinterred, from the collection of records published 

 in 1838, and known as ' Grdnlands Historiske Mindesms&rker' (vol. 

 i. pp. 123-134), the interesting fact that somewhere about the year 

 1574, an Icelander, hight Latra Clemens, visited certain islands 

 then called Grunnbjornsskjierene, and since identified with Danell's 

 or Graah's Islands, laying in lat. 65° 20' N., whereon he found so 

 many Gare-fowls, that he loaded one of his boats with them. This 

 is the only information, we believe, on record, that the bird ever 

 occurred on the east coast of Greenland. On the west coast it has 

 certainly never been known otherwise than as an occasional strag- 

 gler. Briinnich, in 1764, makes no mention of its being found in 

 Greenland ; and Pabricius, in 1780, while giving us its Eskimaux 

 name ' Isarokitsok ' (little wings), states that it is "raro ad insulas 

 extremas visa, et quidem tempore brumali," adding " veteres raris- 

 simi." During the present century, one, which is now in the Uni- 

 versity Museum, at Copenhagen, is said to have been killed on Diskb, 

 in 1821, but it is possible that it may have been captured some years 

 earlier, at Eiskernses, and, says Professor Eeinhardt (Ibis, 1861, 

 p. 15), " the accounts of other instances, in which the bird is said t-o 

 have been obtained in Greenland, are hardly to be confided in." 



But one more locality for Alca impennis remains to be mentioned. 

 It is, however, one of the most important for our consideration ; not 

 only because we have numerous notices of it in the very words of 

 the ancient mariners who visited it, but also because we can gather 

 from these notices a very good idea of what was probably the state 

 of things as regards the Gare-fowl in parts of our own and neigh- 

 bouring countries in the pre-historic ages. Professor Steenstrup has 

 the merit of being the first naturalist who has collated these early 



