SEA FOWL IN NOVA SCOTIA—GILPIN. 149 
auk, now universally admitted to be extinct, as a forewarning of 
the fate of others. If we admit, as indeed every one must, that 
Joseph Josselyn Gent, when writing of “N. England’s varieties,” 
1672, was describing under the name of wobble, the great auk, 
then used as food and common in New England in June, “an ill- 
shaped bird having no long feathers on their pinions, which is 
the reason they cannot fly, not much unlike the penguin,” the 
complete extinction of this bird shows what the presence of man 
can do. <A bird organized for existence in temperate zones is 
pushed backwards to arctic lands, and those unable to adapt their 
organization to its new habitat perish. It is singular that the 
Species now supposed to be becoming extinct, the Labrador pied 
duck, differs from all its co-genera in having a membranous bill, 
and is allied (Coues) to a soft-billed species in New Zealand in 
this respect. May we not look to this feature among the causes 
of its inability to maintain that position which other species 
around it seem able to do. There is a growing tendency in the 
guillimots, the puffins, and razor-bills, to become scarce about the 
shores of the Province, and they are less easily obtained by col- 
lectors than formerly. The family of gulls and terns, with the 
sheldrakes, both mergansers and goosanders, including the hooded, 
breed here ; all the species of sheldrakes, and many of the gulls, 
and none of them diminishing. Yet in early autumn the numbers 
of gulls which arrive show that we owe their presence to migration. 
T had scarcely noted, Tusket, Bay of Fundy, Sept., 1879, a laugh- 
ing gull (L. atricilla) for the first time, before a letter reached me 
from my friend Mr. Boardman, St. Stephen’s, saying it appeared 
on the St. Croix with other southern species about the same 
time. Of very rare species that have reached us may be men- 
tioned the tropic bird, the frigate pelican and the purple galli- 
nule, from the south, and the pomerine jagger from the north, 
and all after very heavy storms; the jagver after the one pre- 
dicted by Saxby, Oct., 1869, and the gallinule Feb., 1870, a few 
days after the hurricane in which it was supposed the “City of 
Boston” was lost, and which the transport “ Orontes” barely 
survived. 
I have thus in this paper made a study of that portion of 
