APPENDIX: NO. XLI. 47 
myself agreed that it made by no means a bad dish; but I must 
state, that our only alternative at that time was dried mutton or 
whale’s flesh. Guillemots, too, and their kindred, are very eatable 
when properly cooked ; and we had the opportunity of tasting them 
at a clergyman’s, where were some very good things with which to 
form a comparison. Gulls are very inferior, but the reported best 
birds of all, young Shearwaters, we had not the chance of tasting. 
Of the young of one of the Cormorants we saw a remarkable 
monstrosity ; it had four legs, two of which were combined into 
one, situated centrally and posteriorly; it was much shorter than 
the others, and useless. Unfortunately the body had been eaten the 
day before ; the skin was to be sent to Copenhagen. 
The Soland Goose, called Sula by the Faroese, and Jan van Gent 
by sailors, according to Landt, whence perhaps our name of Gannet. 
This bird occupies one large rock, the west end of the Faroe Isles ; 
for the Shetland and Orkuey Isles it bas the Sule Skerry, which is 
thirty miles to the west of Orkney. It has selected St. Kilda, off 
the Hebrides, and it has chosen too that most central situation, 
Ailsa Crag. It is also said to occupy Lundy Island in the Bristol 
Channel—I know not how truly. Lundi is the Faroese name for 
the Puffin. A Gannet rock is mentioned off the south-west of 
Ireland. On the whole east coast of Britain, its only station is 
the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth. The name Su/a, I was told, 
has a reference to its quickness of sight. It is worthy of note, that 
each nation modifies the root of a name to some signification in its 
own language, as Mr. Strickland has admirably illustrated in his 
etymology of the word Dodo. Su/a is Soland, Jan van Gent is 
Gannet, and perhaps both these last from the German Gans, as 
it has been lately suggested to me. We must also bear in mind, 
that the appellation of one bird is often put on the shoulders of 
another, as often illustrated in our colonies. Probably the name 
Shelder, which in Shetland and the Faroe Islands is applied to the 
Oyster Catcher, from its shell eating propensities, has been shifted 
to the Sheldrake (Yadorna vulpanser), just as the name Hoody Crow 
is appled to the Larus ridibundus in Orkney. So Lomvia is the 
Faroese name of Uria troile, Loon the local English of Podiceps or of 
Colymbus. 
Sterna arctica appears to be the Tern which Graba described 
as peculiar to the Faroe Islands, under the name of S. brachytarsa. 
It was in some numbers, breeding very late. I found no other 
species. 
In the only two spots where that noble bird, Lestris catarrhactes, 
now breeds in the British Islands, it is preserved only by the 
utmost vigilance of the proprietors, one of whom, Mr. Edmondston, 
has succeeded in recovering the stock, after it had been reduced to a 
single pair in Unst. But in Faroe its breeding places are numerous, 
though its preservation demands great self control on the part of the 
people, for its attacks upon any one approaching its nest are most 
irritating. Its blows are aimed at the head, with the full momentum 
