ORGANS OF BREA THING. 53 



from the part nearest the body, proving, beyond a doubt, that 

 it contained air in considerable quantities. 



The quills of the feathers are also air-vessels, which can be 

 emptied and filled at pleasure. 



There is a bird called the Gannet, or Solan Goose, which 

 is a beautiful instance of this wonderful provision; it lives 

 on fish, and passes the greater part of its time either in the 

 air or on the water, even in the most tempestuous weather, 

 when it may be seen floating like a cork on the wildest waves. 

 To enable it to do so with the least possible inconvenience, 

 it is provided with a greater power of filling and puffing itself 

 with air than almost any other bird. It can even force air 

 between its skin and its body to such a degree that it 

 becomes nearly as light and buoyant as a bladder. This 

 buoyancy, however, entirely prevents its diving after fish; 

 nature, therefore, has applied a remedy by giving an extra- 

 ordinary force and rapidity of flight, in enabling the creature 

 to dart down on a shoal from a great height This velocity is 

 so prodigious, that the force with which it strikes the surface 

 of the water is sufficient to stun a bird not prepared for such 

 a blow, or to force the water up the nostrils. But the Gannet 

 has nothing to fear from either of these causes, the front of 

 its head being covered with a sort of horny mask, which gives 

 it a singularly wild appearance; and it has no nostrils, a 

 deficiency amply remedied by the above-mentioned reservoirs 

 of air, and capacity for keeping them always filled. Some 

 notion may be formed of the rapidity of their descent by a 

 curious^mode of taking them, occasionally practised by the 

 fishermen in the North. A board is turned adrift, on which 

 a dead fish is fastened. On seeing it, the Gannet pounces 

 down, and is frequently killed or stunned by striking the 

 board, or is secured by its sharp-pointed beak being actually 

 driven into the wood like a nail and holding it fast. 



There is another bird even more copiously supplied with air 

 than the above, called the Chavana Fidele, in which the skin 

 is entirely separated from the flesh, and filled with an infinity 

 of small air-cells, the legs and even toes partaking of the same 

 singularity, so that it appears much larger than it really is, 



