IN THE SHETLANDS 23 
name, though not wholly deserved—having been, orig- 
inally, a plain homely-coloured bird, like his relative, 
the great skua, is being gradually modified, under the 
influence of sexual selection, into a most beautiful one, 
as represented by the extreme light or half-cream form. 
Natural selection, in the more general sense, seems 
here excluded, or, at any rate, extremely doubtful ; 
and if it be suggested that the lighter birds have the 
more vigorous constitutions, that they are fuller of 
verve and energy, to which they owe their cream 
colouring, I, for my part, can only say “ Prodi- 
gious!” (or think it), like Dominie Sampson. But 
I can assure all those who hold this unmanageable 
view—for really there is no dealing with it—that the 
one sort came not a whit nearer to knocking my cap 
off than did the other. But, leaving shadows, the 
main facts here suggest choice in a certain direction. 
There is a gradation of colour and pattern, connecting 
two forms—one plain, the other lovely. This sug- 
gests a passage from one to the other, and if the 
plain mature form—I mean the uniform brown one— 
most resembles the young bird in colouring—which 
to me it seems to do—whilst the young bird resem- 
bles, more than any old one, an allied plainer species, 
this makes it more than likely that the passage has 
been from the plain to the lovely, and not from the 
lovely to the plain. Supporting and emphasising this, 
we have the absence, in the tail of the young bird, of 
those lance-like feathers which give so marked a 
character to, and add so infinitely to the grace of, the 
