APPENDIX: NO. XLIV. 67 
lower shelves of the rocks, but in every row of ten or twenty 
Guillemots, one or two were sure to have the white about the eyes. 
I took with great care the eggs from underneath several of the 
white-eyed ones. They differ in no respect from the other eggs, 
and are liable to the same varieties. Jn one instance of a row of ten 
or twelve eggs, the only white one (there was scarcely a spot upor 
it) was laid by a white-eyed bird, which so far gives colour to the 
story of the Flamborough climbers, that the Ringed Guillemots lay 
white eggs. However, I am by no means sure (alas for egg- 
collectors !) that birds are always found sitting on their own eggs. 
Does not a Guillemot when wishing to sit take to the first egg which 
it finds uncovered on the shelf or part of the shelf to which it has 
attached itself? At all events, moved about as the eggs often are, 
and ignorant of exchanges made for them as most birds seem to be, 
it appears probable that such may be the case; and certainly it is so 
with another gregarious sea-bird laying a single egg—the Gannet. 
At the Bass I have seen one go and sit upon the nearest unoccupied 
egg, when pecked off another egg which it had previously been sitting 
on, by a comrade just arriving from the sea. Yet this bird makes a 
nest ; indeed that which came up last, in the anecdote I have just 
related, showed a knowledge of some claim of right or might to 
which the other submitted. In the Shetland Isles, on the sides of 
the Holm of Noss, I saw the white-eyed birds sitting on their eggs 
side by side with the others, in about the same proportion as in 
Handa. In the Faroe Islands the Ringed Guillemots struck me as 
being perhaps in greater plenty than in the North of Scotland, 
especially on the little rocks at the level of the sea; of course not 
breeding in those low situations ; but the Common Guillemots were 
always in far greater numbers than the Ringed, and always mixed 
with them. Down the stupendous cliffs of these islands, I did not 
attend so much to the Guillemots when such rare and interesting 
birds as the Fulmars fully occupied me, but I examined the heaps 
of broken-necked birds brought up by the climbers for provision ; 
here, if I remember right, the proportion was about as one to ten. 
Of two Ringed birds which I dissected in Fugloe, one was a male 
the other a female. I constantly made inquiries of the people, who 
are very intelligent, and very intimately acquainted with their birds. 
They none of them had ever dreamed of the white-eyed birds being 
of a different kind from the others, but some of them thought that 
they were the males, others that they were the females,—both 
opinions, as I ascertained, only partially true. In other instances also 
they never confounded two kinds of birds. They even recognized 
the two species of Fjad/murra—the Dunlin and the Purple Sandpiper. 
I feel convinced that if the ornithologists who have described the 
two species of Guillemot had had opportunities of seeing them on 
their native rocks, the idea of their being distinct could hardly have 
occurred to them. The differences due to age in the Razor-bill 
formerly gave a far more plausible ground for a subdivision of species 
in its case. Were we to follow the analogy of that species, we might 
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