102 BIRDS OF ICELAND 



with my glasses focussed upon it at a distance of ten 

 to twenty yards. It had unmistakably a chestnut 

 head and neck and a pure white breast, and I returned 

 to the nest absolutely certain that I had been following 

 a Sanderling. By ill-luck neither of us carried a gun 

 that day. The eggs were almost on the point of 

 hatching, and were in appearance miniatures of the 

 Whimbrel's eggs, corresponding exactly to the plate of 

 the Sanderling's eggs in ISTares' Narrative, I submitted 

 the carbolised eggs, on my return to England, to the 

 examination of a gentleman whose judgment on such 

 matters I consider to be equal to anybody's. He 

 offered to buy them, miserable specimens as they were, 

 for £2 each, which showed pretty conclusively what 

 he thought of them. Afterwards Carter extracted the 

 chicks in bits from his pair of eggs, and I did the 

 same with mine — and they all had minute hind toes ! 

 The Sanderling has none, not even the rudimentary 

 nail, which, as Mr. W. E. Clarke has shown us {Ihis, 

 1892, p. 402), is always to be found on the Kittiwake, 

 where all other gulls have a hind toe. In the Kitti- 

 wake the absence of the hind toe is clearly due to 

 arrested development ; in the Sanderling, as no rudi- 

 ment survives, it is possible that it exists in the embryo 

 and is lost at hatching, as the ' egg-tooth ' is. At all 

 events, these four hind toes cannot drive out of my 

 mind the conviction that on that day I saw a Sander- 

 ling leave her nest. 



The eggs of the Sanderling, as hinted above, are of 

 an olivaceous buff, spotted with light umber brown. 



