90 PETRELS OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN. 



repay Mr. Huxley for his trouble : — so that even a 

 naturalist would here find his occupation gone were 

 it not for the numbers of oceanic birds daily met 

 \\'ith^ the observation of whose habits and succession 

 of occurrence served to fill up many a leisure hour. 

 It being- the winter of the southern hemisphere, 

 the members of the petrel family, at other times so 

 abundant in the South Pacific, were by no means so 

 numerous as I had expected to find them, and in 

 the hio-her southern latitudes which we attained 

 before rounding' Cape Horn, albatrosses had alto- 

 o-ether disappeared, although they had been abun- 

 dant as far to the southward as 41° S. The most 

 widely dispersed w^re Daption Capcnsis — the 

 pintado or Cape- pigeon of voyagers — Procellaria 

 hasitata, P. coendea, P. Lessomi, and P. gigantea, 

 of which the first and second were the most 

 numerous and readily took a bait towing' astern. 

 It is probable that all these species make the circuit 

 of the globe, as they are equally distributed over the 

 South Indian Ocean. Some interesting additions 

 were made to the collection of Procellariadce 

 (commenced near the equator with Thalassidroma 

 LcacJiii), and before leaving the Falklands I had cap- 

 tured and prepared specimens of twenty-two species 

 of this highly interesting family, many members of 

 which until the publication of Mr. Gould's memoir* 

 were either unknown or involved in obscurity and 

 confusion. Among' these is one which merits 



* Magazine and Annals of Natural History for 1844, p. 360. 



