374 T"tie Petrels 



even the most enthusiastic of Nature lovers could 

 truthfully profess to see any beauty in a Fulmar. 

 Its colours are nondescript, dingy ; its beak huge 

 and cabbage-water green. In numbers south of the 

 Line it is to seek, only up north, in those untilled 

 regions of cold and storm, does it flourish in vast 

 flocks, and provide a patent medicine for St. Kildians, 

 Among the almost inaccessible rocks of the Hebrides 

 it breeds, but nowhere in such numbers as at St. 

 Kilda, affording to the hardy lonely islanders, who 

 have long learned not to be fastidious, a never-failing 

 means of livelihood. Although one would have 

 thought that a Fulmar's egg for breakfast would act 

 as a sure discouragement against any further experi- 

 ments in the direction of egg eating, from the ex- 

 ceedingly rank and inimitable odour thereof, these 

 dainties are so highly thought of by the St. Kildians 

 that the collecting of them forms the principal occu- 

 pation of the islanders. In it they continually risk 

 their lives, as the bird roosts in the most inaccessible 

 places, on ledges a few inches wide, worn in the faces 

 of perpendicular or overhanging precipices. In like 

 manner also do the islanders collect the live oil from 

 the bird's stomach ; just a few teaspoonfuls of clear 

 but intensely fetid oil, which the bird vomits when 

 seized, into a vessel held for the purpose. But all 

 this is a many-times told tale, and one perhaps which 

 is not strictly within the limits of my subject. It is 

 exceedingly strange, however, that while the northern 

 Fulmar is so very abundant, and is, moreover, never 

 seen far from shore, his southern brother is a solitary 

 bird as far as his own kind go, and is met with as far 

 from land as any bird can get. 



And now, as it would only be tiresome repetition 

 to go 9ver the €mall differeftce between the varieties 



I 



