GARE-FOWL 307 
stuffed skin is now in the British Museum,! while its mate had been 
killed before his arrival. None have been seen there since. As to 
the Hebrides, St. Kilda is the only locality recorded for it, and 
there but two examples are believed to have been taken during 
the present century, one being a living bird given in 1821 by Mr. 
Maclellan of Glass to Fleming, who not being aware of the par- 
ticulars of its capture, erroneously recorded them (Hdinb. Phil. 
Journ. x. p. 96). These have now been ascertained. The second 
was killed about 1840.2. That the Gare-fowl was not plentiful in 
either group of islands is sufficiently obvious, as also is the im- 
possibility of its continuing to breed “up to the year 1830.” 
: But mistakes like these are not confined to British authors. 
As on the death of an ancient hero myths gathered round his 
memory as quickly as clouds round the setting sun, so have stories, 
probable as well as impossible, accumulated over the true history 
of this species, and it behoves the conscientious naturalist to exer- 
cise more than common caution in sifting the truth from the large 
mass of error. Americans at one time asserted that the specimen 
which belonged to Audubon (now at Vassar College) was obtained 
by him on the banks of Newfoundland, though there was Macgilli- 
vray’s distinct statement (Brit. Birds, v. p. 359) that Audubon 
procured it in London. The account given by Degland (Orn. 
Europ. ii. p. 529) in 1849, and repeated in the last edition of his 
work by M. Gerbe, of its extinction in Orkney, is so manifestly 
absurd that it deserves to be quoted in full:—“II se trouvait en 
assez grand nombre il y a une quinzaine d’années aux Orcades; 
mais le ministre presbytérien dans le Mainland, en offrant une 
forte prime aux personnes qui lui apportaient cet oiseau, a été 
cause de sa destruction sur ces iles.”. The same author claims the 
species as a visitor to the shores of France on the testimony of 
Hardy (Annuaire Normand, 1841, p. 298), which he grievously 
misquotes both in his own work and in another place (Nawmannia, 
1 Bullock’s own account, all he ever published on the subject, appeared in 
1814 (Companion to the London Museum, ed. 16, pp. 75, 76), and is as follows: 
‘Of this rare and noble bird, we have no account of any having been killed on 
the shores of Britain, except this specimen, for upwards of one hundred years. 
It was taken at Papa Westra in Orkney, to the rocks of which it had resorted for 
several years, in the summer of 1813, and was finely preserved and sent to me by 
Miss Trail of that island. . . . I had the pleasure of examining this curious bird 
in its native element ; it is wholly incapable of flight, but so expert a diver that 
every effort to shoot it was ineffectual.” Fuller details will be found in Messrs. 
Buckley and Harvie-Brown’s Vertebrate Fauna of Orkney (pp. 245-257). I have 
reason to believe that the breeding-place of this last pair was on the Holm 
of Papa Westray, though the survivor was killed on the main island of that 
name. . 
* For the whole story see Messrs. Harvie-Brown and Buckley’s Vertebrate 
Fauna of the Outer Hebrides (pp. 158-160). 
