8 ALBATROS 
this pressure of the air against his wings with the force of gravity, 
and by using his head and tail as bow and stern rudders, that the 
Albatros is enabled to sail in any direction he pleases, so long as 
his momentum lasts.” Much discrepancy, at present inexplicable, 
exists in the accounts given by various writers of the expanse of 
wing in this species. We may set aside as a gross exaggeration the 
assertion that examples have been obtained measuring 20 feet, but 
Dr. George Bennett of Sydney (Wanderings, &c., ii. p. 363) states that 
he has “never seen the spread of the wings greater than fourteen 
feet.” Recently Mr. J. F. Green (Ocean Birds, p. 5) says that, out of 
more than one hundred which he had caught and measured the 
largest was 11 feet 4 inches from tip to tip, a statement exactly con- 
firmed, he adds, by the forty years’ experience of a ship-captain who 
had always made a point of measuring these birds, and had never 
found one over that length. 
This Albatros is too well known by description in countless 
books, or by specimens to be seen in almost any museum, to need 
many words as to its chief features. In the adult the plumage of 
the body is white, more or less mottled above by fine wavy bars, 
and the quill-feathers of the wings are brownish-black. The young 
are suffused with slaty-brown, the tint becoming lighter as the bird 
grows older. It is found throughout the Southern Ocean, seldom 
occurring northward of lat. 30° S.,1 and is invariably met with by 
ships that round the Cape of Good Hope or pass the Strait of 
Magellan. As a species it is said to be less numerous than most of 
its smaller congeners, and one cannot but fear that it will become 
rarer still, if not extinct, partly because of the senseless slaughter to 
which it is subjected by the occupants of almost every ship, but 
especially because of the ravages inflicted upon it at its not too many 
breeding-places, which are on islands mostly small and remote, where 
disastrous havoc can be, and continually is, wrought by a boat’s crew 
in a few hours. 
In the North-Pacific Ocean are found two other large species of 
Albatros, regarded for a long time by ornithologists as identical 
with D. exulans, but now recognized as being distinct species. 
They have also been confounded with one another by some authors, 
while the young have been described as if different from their 
parents, so that their nomenclature presents a tangled puzzle which 
it would be impossible here to unravel. Enough to say, that the 
one of them which is most like D. exulans, and has over and over 
again been so termed by authors, is the D. albatrus of Pallas, its 
young being the D. derogata of Swinhoe. This seems to be always 
1 Instances are recorded of its occurrence in Europe and North America, and 
no doubt examples of some species of Albatros have wandered so far from their 
usual range ; but whether D. exulans is one of them scems to await proof. Fossil 
remains of Diomedea have been found in Suffolk (Q. J. Geol. Soc. 1886, p. 367). 
