96 PETRELS OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN. 



repay Mr. Huxley for his trouble : — so that even a 

 naturalist would here find, his occupation g-one were 

 it not for the numbers of oceanic birds daily met 

 with^ the observation of whose habits and succession 

 of occurrence served to fill up man}" a leisure hour. 

 It being' the winter of the southern hemisphere^ 

 the members of ihe petrel family^ at other times so 

 abundant in the South Pacific^ were by no means so 

 numerous as I had expected to find them^ and in 

 the hio-her southern latitudes which we attained 

 before rounding* Cape Horn, albatrosses had alto- 

 g-ether disappeared^ althoug'h they had been abun- 

 dant as far to the southward as 41° S. The most 

 widely dispersed were D{q)tion Capensis — the 

 pintado or Cape- pig-eon of voj^ag^ers — Procellaria 

 hasitata, P. cceruleuy P. Lessonii, and P. gigantcciy 

 of which the first and second were the most 

 numerous and readity took a bait to\'i'ino' astern. 

 It is probable that all these species make the circuit 

 of the g'lobe, as they are equally distributed over the 

 South Indian Ocean. Some interestino- additions 

 were made to the collection of Procellariados 

 (commenced near the equator with Thalassidroma 

 Leaclm), and before leaving- the Falklands I had cap- 

 tured and prepared specimens of twenty-two species 

 of this highly interesting- family^ many members of 

 which until the publication of Mr. Gould^s memoir* 

 were either unknown or involved in, obscurity and 

 confusion. Among- these is one which merits 



* Magazine and Annals of Natural History for 1844, p. 360. 



