220 EXTERMINATION 
mentioned was long subsequent to that in which the primeval 
woods of the islands were burnt. What, then, must not have been 
the changes which the forest-fires produced ? 
If this be not enough we may cite the case of the French 
islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, in which, according to M. 
Guyon (Comptes Rendus, |xiii. p. 589), there were once found six 
species of Psittaci, all now exterminated ; and it may possibly be 
that the Maccaws stated by Gosse (B. Jamaica, p. 260) and Mr. 
March (Proc. Acad. N. S. Philad. 1863, p. 283) to have formerly 
frequented certain parts of Jamaica, but not apparently noticed 
there for many years, have fallen victims to colonization and its 
consequences.? 
But from the North Atlantic seas two species have disappeared 
within the lifetime of men who are not yet very old, and one of them 
was a truly British bird. This was the GARE-FOWL, or Great Auk, 
Alca impennis, whose bones have been found in the kitchen-middens 
of Denmark, and afterwards in similar deposits in Caithness and 
Oronsay, and in a cave on the coast of Durham. This species 
seems to have become extinct since 1844, in which year the 
last two examples known to have lived were taken on a rocky 
islet-—one of a group called Fuglaskér, or Fowl-skerries, off the 
south-west point of Iceland. ‘Ten years before, one had been 
caught alive at the entrance of Waterford harbour; and in 1821 
one was taken on the west side of St. Kilda,* to which lonely 
island, as appears from old authors, the bird had been accustomed 
to resort in the breeding season. In 1811 and 1812 a pair were 
killed at Papa-Westray, and the stuffed skin of the last of them is 
preserved in the British Museum, while that of the Waterford 
specimen may be seen in the museum of Trinity College, Dublin. 
In the Feroes the species was formerly common, but it certainly 
ceased from appearing there about the beginning of the present 
century. In the Iceland seas there are three localities called after 
the bird’s name, but on only one of them has it been observed for 
many years, having probably been as long extirpated in the others as 
in the Feroes. On the locality where it continued latest, there is 
ample evidence to shew that it once was plentiful. ‘There was a 
large skerry—the Geirfuglaskér proper—on which, in 1813, the 
crew of a Froese vessel made a descent and slaughtered a large 
number of Gare-fowls; but this, like the rest of the group, was a 
place very difficult of access, and in 1821, Faber, the well-known 
faunist of Iceland, failed to land upon it, though some of his 
companions reached the Geirfugladrangr, a smaller islet lying further 
1 For other instances of extermination, effected or threatened, in the Antilles, 
see note at p. 227, infra. 
* Another one seems to have been caught and killed on Stack an Armin, about 
1840, but the year is uncertain. In 1887 I saw the man who said he killed it. 
