136 So? it kern Cross. 



lie supports himself on the tripod feet and tail; as he waddles along, 

 with his feet, as it were, tied together, and trying to balance himself 

 by vigorous movements of his flippers, his tail cuts a deep furrow in 

 the snow, broken at intervals as he half loses his balance and sways 

 forwards; hurrying on, he soon loses his balance altogether and 

 topples forward on his breast, in which attitude he progresses at an 

 even more rapid pace, the flippers being used alternately as paddles, 

 and the feet pushing behind, the tail in this posture not touching the 

 ground. In the water his modes of progression are also two : usually 

 he is seen to swim under water in a prolonged dive, broken at 

 intervals of about thirty yards, as he rises for breath, leaping clean 

 out of the water to the height of perhaps a foot, and immediately 

 disappearing with scarcely a ripple, after clearing a space of 2 to 

 2^ feet. Swimming in this way, the feet remain motionless, and only 

 the flippers act as powerful paddles ; in this manner the bird shoots 

 along with great rapidity. The other mode of swimming develops 

 but a slow pace ; floating on the surface like a Cormorant, he swims 

 in the ordinary way by means of his webbed feet, his wings remain- 

 ing idle. On leaving the water for the ice, he shoots straight up 

 from below the surface, and lands in an erect position ; in this way 

 he can jump on to a piece of ice as much as 2^ feet above the 

 water-line. 



" In Lieutenant Spry's notes on the voyage of the ' Challenger,' 

 he states, as the result of an experiment, that a Penguin perished on 

 being held under the water for the space of one and a half minutes. 

 To test this statement I repeated the experiment, and held a Penguin 

 below the surface for the space of six minutes. At the end of two 

 minutes, among other violent struggles, convulsive pumping move- 

 ments of the chest occurred ; these were repeated at the end of four 

 and a half minutes, and again immediately before I released the bird. 

 Though considerably exhausted, it recovered satisfactorily, and was 

 set at liberty half an hour afterwards. To account for this dis- 

 crepancy in the two results, I may say that I carefully excluded 

 water from the lungs by compressing the trachea, whereas in 

 Lieutenant Spry's experiment the bird was simply lowered below 

 the surface in a lobster creel. 



" On one occasion (January 5th), in the north of the Erebus and 

 Terror Gulf, we had an opportunity of seeing the birds swimming in 

 large schools of from 200 to 300, the movements of the school being 

 controlled by a single individual which followed in the rear, and 

 which appeared to be of larger size, though we could not approach 

 close enough to determinate its characters. When first seen, at a 



