234 
immensely interested in watching me, 
that they pursued me for a while when 
I left the spot. 
On another occasion I witnessed an 
extraordinary diversion of the penguins 
in the graveyard pool already mentioned. 
This pond, lying in a hollow of the hills, 
was bordered on three sides with a 
perpendicular bank of hard snow, the 
remaining shore being a stony slope. 
On the afternoon of my visit penguins 
- were swimming jn it, for pure enjoyment 
of course, for there was no food, no 
living thing, not even a visible alga, in 
the transparent snow water. How alert 
and reptilian the penguins seemed in 
How unlike the 
inelegant, ridiculous creatures they are 
ashore! They dashed straightaway un- 
der water the length of the pool and 
their own element! 
back again, with a velocity which I had 
then an opportunity to compute as about 
thirty feet a second. They chased each 
other round and round, flashing into the 
air twice or thrice during their bursts 
of speed, every action plainly revealed 
through the clear, quiet water, with the 
white dead birds down below them. 
When the swimmers rested at the sur- 
face, only the white-filleted head and 
up-pointed, ridged tail showed, as a rule, 
but sometimes they would float higher, 
like grebes. Several of them tried to 
leap out onto the bank of frozen snow 
which rose a yard above the water. 
Strangely enough they misjudged their 
distance repeatedly; they jumped too 
soon, and were on the downward seg- 
ment of their arc before they had cleared 
the edge. 
dozen times and fail; it always leapt a 
I saw one individual try a 
few lengths too soon and whacked its 
shiny breast against the wall of ice. A 
group of birds, which had been sunning 
on a snow bank, entered the water as if 
by mutual agreement. Some of them 
walked to the rocky slope and waded, 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
arching their necks and tucking their 
heads under water before they made the 
plunge. Others flopped off the edge of 
the ice. I say flopped because they did 
not make graceful standing dives, such 
as I had expected; on the contrary they 
entered with flagrant, splashing “belly- 
The great discrepancy be- 
tween the Johnny penguin and the Adélie 
penguin in jumping and diving ability 
first sight rather surprising. 
Through the medium of the films taken 
whoppers.” 
is at 
during the Australasian Antarctic Ex- 
pedition I have seen the prodigious, 
salmon-like leaps of the plucky little 
Adélies, while the photographs of Scott’s 
Expedition well illustrate the graceful 
dives of these denizens of polar shores. 
It must be borne in mind, however, 
that the Johnny, with a Subantarctic 
range, breeds on no land which has an 
ice-shelved coast. The ability to gain 
the land by a catapultic spring has 
doubtless vanished with the disappear- 
ance of the necessity for such a method. 
The Johnny penguins often feed far 
at sea, but during the long breeding 
season they apparently all return to the 
land for the night. In late afternoon 
we usually saw long troops of them 
“porpoising”’ into the fiords from sea. 
This habit is so well known that sealers, 
overtaken in their boats by an impene- 
trable South Georgian fog, rely upon the 
home-coming penguins for the direction 
of the flat beaches. 
Considering the fact that most marine 
birds swim as soon as they emerge from 
the shell, the tardiness of young penguins 
in taking to the water has been pointed 
out as a remarkable phenomenon. The 
explanation of this, however, is doubtless 
that the speed and stamina required in 
capturing living pelagic food, in escaping 
from the dreaded sea-leopard, and in 
swimming through breaking surf, cannot 
be developed early in life by birds which 
