138 THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS 
had the luck to see it. Sometimes he seems to hang 
motionless over the stern of the steamer in the 
style with which Gulls have made us familiar. As I 
understand the story, the Albatross in Coleridge’s 
famous poem was poised on an up-current above 
the ship’s stern, presenting a big, steady target 
impossible to miss, when the Ancient Mariner was 
mean enough to shoot the unsuspecting bird. Some- 
times, I am told, the Albatross sweeps majestically 
downward to a point some way off from the ship, 
his wings all the while outstretched. It seems that 
he must be practising the same kind of manceuvre 
that Gannets or Shearwaters practise, in their com- 
paratively humble way, when they advance without 
a motion of their wings at right angles to the wind, 
or, occasionally, with the wind or against it. Accord- 
ing to accounts, the Albatross takes downward 
sweeps on a gigantic scale. Those who describe it 
say that his evolutions carry him far away from the 
vessel. How, then, are we to provide him with an 
up-current that will lift him without his having to 
move his giant wings ? What but the waves can 
deflect the wind for him, when he has planed down 
to regions beyond the steamer’s sphere of influence ? 
The Albatross is as completely subject to physical 
laws as any other bird, or as a man of twenty stone 
weight, and we may depend upon it that, if he is to 
rise in the air, it must either be by means of the 
contraction of muscles and powerful wing-strokes 
or else by the help of an ascending current of air. 
‘Those whose good fortune it is to see this noble bird 
at his play should watch him carefully and note all 
the conditions, instead of merely gazing, as many 
