372 BRITISH BIRDS. 



pounds), with a wing no larger than that of a small duck, was of course 

 utterly unable to raise itself from the ground or from the water. A 

 powerful bird, it had probably few enemies with which it was unable to 

 cope, until man appeared upon the scene ; but even from him its unrivalled 

 power of diving secured it from danger, except during the breeding-season. 

 Birds like the Guillemot, the Razorbill, the Gannet, and the Kittiwake, 

 which frequented the same feeding-grounds as the Great Auk, found safety 

 for their eggs on the ledges of overhanging rocks, or the summit of in- 

 accessible cliffs; but the Great Auk could only shuffle along the gentle 

 slope of some lonely strand, and deposit her egg a few yards above high- 

 water mark, trusting only to the ceaseless swell of the Atlantic to wreck 

 the canoes of invading robbers. It appears never to have entered into the 

 calculation of the earlier generations of Great Auks that sooner or later 

 evolution would produce a race of sailors to whom no flat coasts would be 

 impregnable ; one generation after another used their wings less than their 

 ancestors had done, each generation left to its descendants the heritage of 

 a neglected and consequently dwarfed wing, until in process of time all 

 power of flight was lost, and the wing became a rudimentary appendage, 

 only used as a supplementary aid to the tail in steering under water like 

 the flappers of a Penguin or the fins of a whale. There can be little doubt 

 that the small wings of the Great Auk were the result of degradation by 

 disuse ; this and the corresponding development by use are two factors in 

 the process of evolution to which .by far too little importance is attached ; 

 they are in fact direct causes of variation, which are cumulative without 

 any aid from natural or other selection, and act independently of any 

 struggle for existence. It is scarcely possible to imagine any benefit to be 

 derived from a reduction in the size of the wings of the Great Auk from 

 the standard of the ancestors of the genus, nor can we regard this diminu- 

 tion as a case of the survival of the fittest, inasmuch as the species did not 

 survive. The Great Auk perished because it was unable to fly, and conse- 

 quently could not find a place where its egg was safe. 



The Great Auk appears to have been a common bird at one time. 

 Hakluyt states that three hundred and fifty years ago it was numerous on 

 the Island of Penguin, off the coast of Newfoundland, and Capt. Whit- 

 bourne described their abundance in 1620, hundreds being caught at a time 

 on a flat island near that coast ; but in 1819 this wholesale slaughter had 

 caused the Great Auk to become extinct there. The statement that in 

 1574 a boatload of Gare Fowls were obtained by an Icelander on DanelFs 

 Islands, implies that three centuries ago the Great Auk was very abundant 

 off the coasts of South Greenland, but it appears to have lingered longest 

 on the neighbouring coasts of Iceland. In 1813 it was still abundant on 

 the rocky islands off the south-west coast, and as late as 1844 a couple 

 of Great Auks were caught on an island called Eldey, though in 1830 



