MEMOIR. XXXV 



upon the liearl-vvaters o£ the Tana, and descending that river, reached 

 the Varanger district, which had been partially explored by him and 

 his friends in 1855. His hopes o£ finding on his way thither the Snowy 

 Owl and the Pomatorhine Skua breeding were not fulfilled ; but he 

 fell in with several pairs of Buffon^s Skua and took a nest of it with a 

 single egg. Chiefly, however, he was induced to return to that part 

 of the country by the report that, some years previously, a Swedish 

 naturalist had not far oflF met with a breeding-place of the Knot ; but 

 the locality assigned was found to be a mountain deeply covered with 

 snow even late in June, and, thus disappointed for the third time by 

 erroneous information, Wolley had but little to compensate him for his 

 toil and loss of time. When, toward the end of the season, he again 

 returned to Muoniovara, he found a large number of eggs collected 

 for him ; and, before he left for England, he had the additional 

 gratification of receiving, from the Sodankyla district in Finland, 

 some eggs of the Smew, which he had long been trying to get, and 

 they were without doubt the first known to have been obtained by 

 any naturalist. An account of this, the last great oological discovery 

 he was able to make, he contributed to the first number of 'The 

 Ibis,^ published in January, 1859 (pp. 69-76), where it was read with 

 admiration. As a practical lesson of the cautious method to be 

 followed by the true oologist it has no superior, and perhaps hardly 

 an equal. 



He remained in England during the winter of 1857-8 and began 

 diligently working up a subject which he had long been considering 

 and then took seriously in hand — the history of Alca impennis, the 

 Great Auk, or Garefowl as he, using its earliest British name, pre- 

 ferred calling it. With the view of seeking information at the only 

 remaining fountain-head, and if possible of solving the question — at 

 that time still a moot point — of the bird^s existence, in April 1858 

 he sailed for Iceland, and I had the pleasure of accompanying him. 

 After passing some weeks at Reykjavik — not quite uselessly, for he 

 obtained there a certain amount of information bearing on the subject 

 of his enquiries — we repaired to Kyrkjuvogr, the nearest settlement 

 to the ancient breeding-place of the species, the Geirfuglasker, which 

 in 1830 sunk into the sea as the result of a submarine volcanic 

 disturbance, as well as Eldey, the adjacent rocky islet, to which the 



