150 Murdoch, A Historical Nofice of Ross's Rosy Gull. [ A ^"Jj 



1828), and " Mr. Abernethy saw one fly over the ships in Felix 

 Harbour," Boothia Felix, during Ross's second voyage (J. C. 

 Ross ' Appendix ' to the narrative of the second voyage. ... By 

 Sir John Ross, p. xxxvi, London, 1835). Reinhardt admitted 

 the species to his list of ' Birds observed in Greenland,' because 

 he had been "told by a trustworthy person that Holboll formerly 

 possessed an example, probably obtained in Greenland during 

 the latter years of his life" (Ibis, 1861, p. 18). In fact, up to 

 1875, when Mr. Saunders made his census of the specimens 

 known to exist in museums, the only ones whose capture had 

 been previously recorded were the two original specimens, one 

 taken at Heligoland by Gatke on February 5, 1858 (See Heli- 

 goland as an Ornithological Observatory, p. 558) and one shot 

 by Miiller on Suderoe, one of the Faeroe Islands, on February 1, 

 1863 (Naturhistorisk Tidsskrift, ser. 3, vol. Ill, p. 8). Never- 

 theless, Saunders was able to record seven other specimens in 

 collections, four from Disco, Greenland, two said to have come 

 from Kamchatka, and one, an adult in winter plumage, said to 

 have been killed in Yorkshire. The Tegethoff Expedition 

 obtained a single specimen in 1873, while the ship was be et 

 off Franz Josef Land (Payer, New Lands within the Arctic 

 Circle, p. 191, N. Y., 1877), and the Museum at Copenhagen 

 received another specimen, probably from Greenland. Two 

 more solitary specimens were collected in 1879, one in imma- 

 ure plumage by the naturalists of the ' Vega ' Expedition, at 

 Pitlekaj, their winter quarters on the northeast coast of Siberia, 

 on July 1, and the other, a very young one, on October 10, by 

 Mr. Nelson, at St. Michael's, Alaska. The latter was the only 

 specimen seen by Mr. Nelson during a residence of several 

 years at St. Michael's, and it was a strange bird to the Eskimos. 

 Such was the state of our knowledge of the species, when the 

 Point Barrow expedition, in which I was one of the naturalists, 

 sailed from San Francisco in 1881. Fifteen specimens were 

 known to have been taken since 1823 — we were then ignorant 

 of what the naturalist of the ' Jeannette ' had seen and collected 

 — from widely scattered localities, all indicating a completely 

 Arctic distribution. The bird was still one of the great prizes for 

 an ornithologist, and there was no indication that we were more 



