300 GANDER—GANNET 
in one of its varied stages of plumage; but it has since been used, 
especially by American writers, indiscriminately for several SAND- 
PIPERS. 
GANDER (Anglo-Saxon, Gandia), the male GoosE. 
GANNET (Anglo-Saxon, Ganot) or SOLAN Gooss,! the Pelecanus 
bassanus of Linnzeus and the Sula bassana of modern ornithologists, 
a large sea-fowl long known as a numerous visitor, for the purpose 
of breeding, to the Bass Rock at the entrance of the Firth of Forth, 
and to certain other islands off the coast of Britain, of which four 
are in Scottish -waters—namely, Ailsa Craig, at the mouth of the 
Firth of Clyde; the group known collectively as St. Kilda ;? 
North Barra or Sulisgeir (otherwise Suleskerry), some 40 miles 
north of the Butt of Lewis; and the Stack,? about the same distance 
westward of Stromness. It appears also to have two Irish stations, 
the Skellig Islands off the coast of Kerry, and the Bull Rock off that 
of Cork,‘ and it resorts besides to Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel 
—its only English breeding-place, though in Wales a considerable 
settlement occupies Grassholm, off the coast of Pembrokeshire.® 
1 The phrase ganotes bed (Gannet’s bath), a periphrasis for the sea, occurs in 
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in reference to events which took place 975 A.D., as 
pointed out by Prof. R. O. Cunningham, whose learned treatise on this bird ° 
(Ibis, 1866, pp. 1-23) nearly exhausts all that could then be said of its history 
and habits. The name, like Gander and Goose in English and German Gans, is 
from an old base gan, which also supplied the Greek yi, and the Latin anser. 
Solan is no doubt from the Scandinavian Sula, whatever that may mean. 
Prof. Cunningham (ué supr. p. 15) noticed the wonderful mistake of Robert 
Browning, which surpasses the licence ordinarily taken on any subject, save 
natural history, by poets. In Paracelsus (part iii.) ‘‘ we find Festus referring to 
his son Aureole’s glee when some stray Gannet builds amid the birch trees by 
the lake of Geneva !” 
2 Gannets frequent Rockall in the breeding-season, as Basil Hall, in his well- 
known account of that distant rock, states, and as the late Mr. Gwyn Jeffrey told 
me, but whether they breed there is not known. 
3 Cruising round this place in June 1890, my companions and I remarked the 
large proportion (compared with what we had seen elsewhere) the birds which 
had not attained their full plumage bore to those perfectly adult. The most likely 
explanation of the fact seems to be that, the station being so rarely visited and 
its inhabitants so free from molestation, a greater number of young would yearly 
grow up; and I was glad to find afterwards that this way of accounting for it is 
thought to be right by Mr. Harvie-Brown, whose experience is far greater than 
that of any one else (cf. Buckley and Harvie-Brown, Vertebr. Fauna of Orkney, 
p. 160). 
4 This last seems to have been but recently colonized. Whether it ever bred 
upon the Stags of Broadhaven, off the coast of Mayo, as has been stated, is 
doubtful (cf. Barrington and Ussher, Zool. 1884, pp. 473-481). 
5 The history of this settlement is very obscure. Its existence was practically 
unknown to ornithologists until 1890, when a wanton massacre of its inhabitants 
