March 6, 1879] 



NATURE 



417 



are furiously bitten, often by two or three birds at once, 

 thit is, if you have not got on strong leathern gaiters, as 

 •^v. the first occasion of visiting a rookery you probably 



are not. 



'*At first you try to avoid the nests, but soon find that 

 impossible : then, maddened almost by the pain, stench, 

 and noise, you have recourse to brutality. Thump, thump 

 goes your stick, and at each blow down goes a bird. Thud, 

 thud, you hear from the men behind as they kick the 

 birds right and left off the nests, and so you go on for a 

 bit, thump and smash, whack, thud, * caa, caa, urr, urr,' 

 and the path behind you is strewed with the dead, and 

 dying, and bleeding. 



" But you make miserably slow progress, and, worried 

 to death, at last resort to the expedient of stampeding as 

 far as your breath will carry you. You put down your 

 head and make a rush through the g^ass, treading on old 

 and young haphazard, and rushing on before they have 

 time to bite. 



" The air is close in the rooken', and the sun hot 

 above, and, out of breath, steaming with perspiration, 

 you come across a mass of rock fallen from the cliff 

 above, and sticking up in the rookery ; this you hail as 

 * a city of refuge.' You hammer off it hurriedly half a 

 dozen penguins who are sunning themselves there, and 

 are on the look-out, and, mounting on the top, take 

 out your handkerchief to wipe away the perspiration and 

 rest awhile, and see in what direction you have been 

 going, how far you have got, and in which direction you 

 are to make the next plunge. Then, when you are 

 refreshed, you make another rush, and so on. 



" If you stand quite still, so long as your foot is not 

 actually on the top of a nest of eggs or young, the pen- 

 guins soon cease biting at you and yelling. I always 

 adopted the stampede method in rookeries, but the men 

 usually preferred to have their revenge, and fought their 

 way ever)' foot. Of course it is horribly cruel thus to 

 kill whole families of innocent birds, but it is absolutely 

 necessary. One must cross the rookeries in order to 

 explore the island at all, and collect the plants or siurvey 

 the coast from the heights." 



Here is an example (p. 213) of the many observations 

 which the book contains on the habits of birds and other 

 animals : — 



" An idea of the relations of the. various birds to one 

 another in the struggle for existence will be gained from 

 the following incident : — I saw a cormorant rise to the 

 surface of the water, and, lifting its head, make desperate 

 efforts to gorge a small fish which it had caught, evidently 

 knowing its danger, and in a fearful hurry to get it down. 

 Before it could swallow its prey, down came a gull, 

 snatched the fish after a slight struggle, and carried it 

 off to the rocks on the shore. Here a lot of other gulls 

 immediately began to assert their right to a share, when 

 down swooped a skua from aloft, right on to the heap of 

 gulls, seized the fish and swallowed it at once. The shag 

 ought to learn to swallow under water, and the gull to 

 devour its prey at once in the air. The skua is merely a 

 gull which has developed itself by fighting for morsels." 



Mr, Moseley has a great deal to 'say about the structure 

 and natural history of icebergs in the chapter on the 

 southern ice, and has illustrated this part of his book 

 with two coloured plates and numerous woodcuts. The 

 Challenger was in some danger here. " As the weather 

 became worse, we were in a rather critical position. We 

 were surrounded by bergs, with the weather so thick with 

 snow, that we could not see much more than a ship's 

 length, and a heavy gale was blowing. The full power of 

 steam available was employed. Oncewe had a narrow 

 escape of running into a large berg; i parsing only just 

 about 100 yards to leeward of it by making-a stern board, 

 with all the sails aback, and screwing fidJ speed astern at 

 the same time. The deck was covered with frozen pow- 

 dery snow, and forward was coated with ice from the 



shipping of seas. On February 28 again there were forty 

 icebergs in sight at noon. It came on to snow thickly at 

 about 4 P.M., and another gale came on. The plan 

 adopted by Capt, Sir G. Nares was to lay down the bear- 

 ings of the adjacent bergs before the weather became too 

 thick for them to be seen, and then steaming with all the 

 power of the ship against the gale, to hang on as long as 



Fig. 4.— Face cf Japanese Actor. (To show the mode of painring the face. 

 . From, a Japanese Theatrical Picture-book.) . . 



possible under the lee of a large iceberg, and, when 

 driven away from that, to steam rapidly across to the lee 

 of another, the position of which was kno^\•n by the bear- 

 ings taken. So we went on steaming backwards and 

 forwards through the whole of a thick, dark night." 



Fig. 5. — Head of figure burnt at Chinese funerals, made of paste4x>ard. (To 

 show the mode of painting the face.) 



In warmer climes anthropology occupied, as we have 

 said, much of the traveller's attention. The Tongans 

 interested him by their expressive faces and gestures. A 

 boat full of them was commanded by a noble, degraded 

 from his rank by the missionaries, as a punishment for 

 habitual drunkenness (p. 285). 



