306 GARE-FOWL 
man, however likely it may seem, is wholly wanting. The con- 
trary is the case with the Gare-fowl. In Iceland there is the 
testimony of a score of witnesses, taken down from their lips by 
one of the most careful naturalists who ever lived, the late John 
Wolley, that the latest survivors of the species were caught and 
killed by expeditions expressly organized with the view of sup- 
plying the demands of caterers to the various museums of Europe. 
In like manner the fact is incontestable that its breeding-stations 
in the western part of the Atlantic were for three centuries regu- 
larly visited and devastated with the combined objects of furnish- 
ing food or bait to the fishermen from very early days, and its 
final extinction, foretold in 1792 by Cartwright (Labrador, iii. p. 55), 
was due, according to Sir Richard Bonnycastle (Newfoundland in 
1842, i. p. 232), to “the ruthless trade in its eggs and skin.” 
No doubt that one of the chief stations of this species in Icelandic 
waters disappeared, as has been before said (pp. 220, 221), through 
volcanic action— 
‘A land, of old upheaven from the abyss 
By fire, to sink into the abyss again ”— 
and that the destruction of the old Geirfuglaskér drove some at 
least of the birds which frequented it to a rock nearer the main- 
land, where they were exposed to danger from which they had in 
their former abode been comparatively free; yet on this rock 
(Eldey = fire-island) they were “specially hunted down” whenever 
opportunity offered, until the stock there was wholly extirpated in 
1844, and whether any remained elsewhere must be deemed most 
doubtful. 
A third misapprehension was that entertained by Gould who, 
in his Birds of Great Britain, said that “formerly this bird was 
plentiful in all the northern parts of the British Islands, par- 
ticularly the Orkneys and the Hebrides. At the commencement 
of the present century, however, its fate appears to have been 
sealed ; for though it doubtless existed, and probably bred, up to 
the year 1830, its numbers annually diminished until they became 
so few that the species could not hold its own.” 
Now of the Orkneys, we know that Low, who died in 1795, 
says in his posthumously-published Fauna Orcadensis (p. 107) that 
he could not find it was ever seen there ;! and on Bullock’s visit in 
1812 he was told, says Montagu (Orn. Dict. App.), that one male 
only had made its appearance for a long time. This bird he saw and 
unsuccessfully hunted, but it was killed in the following year, and its 
1 However, from his more recently published (Kirkwall: 1879) Zowr, made in 
1774 at the instance of Pennant, we learn that he did not visit Papa Westray, 
the only locality assigned for the bird. His negative evidence is therefore not to 
be taken as conclusive, 
