294 Capt. Sperling's Ornithological Notes 



right to a place in the European avifauna than an escaped 

 Cockatoo would have. I have myself passed two summers in 

 Labrador, and crossed the North Atlantic Ocean eight times, but 

 failed in ever seeing one. Without wishing to force my opinions 

 on any one, I must say that I think more trash has been 

 written about this bird than any other that I have seen noticed ; 

 for instance, Nuttall says (Man. Oro. ii. p. 341) that he was 

 told that they fly near the water, " watching the motions of the 

 Flying Fish, which they seize as they spring out of the water 

 to shun the jaws of the larger fish which pursue them.'' Now I 

 think that any one who has ever seen an Albatros feed will 

 agree with me that such a statement must be purely derived 

 from the imagination. I have never seen an Albatros take 

 food on the wing ; I do not think it would be possible for them 

 to do so. Their method of feeding is to place their unwieldy 

 bodies on the water as near to the floating piece of squid or 

 refuse as possible, and after a careful survey they will swim 

 up to it and eat it. As to the exciting chase after Flyingfish, 

 I can only state that, where the Albatros abounds, the Flying- 

 fish is rare, and scarcely ever seen above the surface. Then, 

 again, there is the statement in Dr. Bennett's ' Gatherings of a 

 Naturalist in Australia' (p. 78), in which that gentleman insti- 

 tutes an elaborate comparison between the flight of an Albatros 

 and the course of a ship on the water; it is made more 

 luminous by a very accurately drawn figure. But, unfortu- 

 nately, as Captain F. W. Hutton has shown (Ibis, 1865, pp. 

 295-297), there is a mechanical principle, relating to the re- 

 quirement of two component forces to form a resultant, which, 

 from being entirely lost sight of in his argument, causes it to 

 fall to the ground. Having often attentively watched the flight 

 of the Albatros, I have ever failed to detect the mysterious and 

 wonderful power of wing ascribed to it by observers like the 

 above, who have perhaps been more highly favoured. None 



Diotnedea chlororhynchus, two specimens of which seem undoubtedly to 

 have been killed near Kongsberg in Norway in April 1837, while, according 

 to Messrs. HoU and Neville Wood, a few months previously, 25 Nov. 

 18'30, one was shot on the Trent, at Stockwdth, near Gainsborough 

 (Analyst, vi. pp. 160, 161).— Ed.] 



