GUINEA FOWL 399 
and progeny. After that time it commonly happens that a few 
examples are occasionally met with in bays and shallow waters. 
Tempestuous weather will drive ashore a large number in a state of 
utter destitution—many of them indeed are not unfrequently 
washed up dead—but what becomes of the bulk of the birds, not 
merely the comparatively few thousands that are natives of Britain, 
but the hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, that are in 
summer denizens of more northern latitudes, no one can yet say. 
This mystery is not peculiar to the Guillemot, but is shared by all 
the Alcidxe that inhabit the Atlantic Ocean. Examples stray every 
season across the Bay of Biscay, are found off the coasts of Spain 
and Portugal, enter the Mediterranean and reach Italian waters, or, 
keeping further south, may even touch the Madeiras, Canaries, or 
Azores ; but these bear no proportion whatever to the mighty hosts 
whose position and movements they no more reveal than do the 
vedettes of a well-appointed army. The common or Foolish (as it 
is often named) Guillemot of both sides of the Atlantic is replaced 
further northward by a species of a stouter build, the 4. arra or 
A. bruennichi of ornithologists, and on the west coast of North 
America by the A. californica. ‘These have essentially the same 
habits, and the structural resemblance between all of them and the 
AUKS is so great that of late several systematists have relegated 
them to the genus Alca, confining the genus Uria to the Guillemots 
of a very distinct group, of which the type is the U. giylle, the 
Black Guillemot of British authors, the DoveKrEy or Greenland 
Dove of sailors, the Tysty of Shetlanders. This bird assumes in 
summer an entirely black plumage with the exception of a white 
patch on each wing, while in winter it is beautifully marbled with 
white and black. Allied to it as species or geographical races are 
the U. mandti, U. columba, and U. carbo. All these differ from the 
larger Guillemots and other members of the genus, Alca, as here 
used, by laying two or three eggs, which are generally placed in 
some secure niche, while the latter lay but a single egg, which is 
invariably exposed on a bare ledge. 
GUINEA FOWL, a well-known domestic gallinaceous bird, so 
called from the country whence in modern times it was brought to 
Europe, the Meleagris and Avis or Gallina Numidica of ancient 
authors.1 Little can be positively stated of the wild stock to which 
we owe our tame birds, nor can the period of its reintroduction 
1 Columella (De Re Rustica, viii. cap. 2) distinguishes the Meleagris from the 
Gallina Africana or Numidica, the latter having, he says, a red wattle (palea, 
a reading obviously preferable to galew), while it was blue in the former. This 
would look as if the Meleagris had sprung from what is now called Nwmida 
ptilorhyncha, while the Gallina Africana originated in the NV. meleagris,—species 
which, as will be seen by the text, have a different range, and if so the fact 
would point to two distinct introductions—one by Greeks, the other by Latins. 
