GREAT AUK. 449 



living. I showed a picture of the Great Auk, which Mr J. H. 

 Gurney, jun., had kindly sent me, to the people, some of whom 

 appeared to recognise it, and said that it had not been seen for 

 many years; but they were so excited by the arrival of strangers, 

 that it was impossible to get them to say more about it, and 

 though Mr Mackay promised to take down any stories or informa- 

 tion about the bird that he could collect, when they had leisure 

 to think about it, he has not as yet sent me any. I do not think, 

 however, that more than two or three examples are at all likely 

 to have been seen in the last forty years, as Mr Atkinson of 

 Newcastle, who went there in 1831, does not say a word about 

 it in his paper* beyond mentioning the name; and neither 

 John Macgillivray, who visited the place in 1840, nor Sir W. 

 Milner, says that any specimens had been recently procured. 

 I believe that Bullock was also there about 1818; and as he 

 had not long before met with the species in Orkney, there is 

 little doubt he would have mentioned it to somebody if he had 

 heard of any having been recently procured at St. Kilda. I made 

 every inquiry about this bird on the north and west coasts of 

 Lewis, and showed pictures of it to the fishermen; but all agreed 

 that nothing of the sort had been seen since they could remember." 

 Writing in 1861, Professor Newton, in a paper contributed by 

 him to the Ibis for that year, on Mr Wolley's researches in Ice- 

 land respecting the Garefowl, states that Sir William Milner had 

 informed him that within the last few years he had become 

 possessed of a fine Great Auk, which he had reason, to believe 

 had been killed in the Hebrides. This specimen was found to 

 have been stuffed with turf. The Great Auk is not mentioned by 

 Dr Patrick Neill in his ' Tour through the Orkney and Shetland 

 Islands/ printed in 1806 a work which contains a full list of 

 the birds known to inhabit that district ; nor is it alluded to by Dr 

 John Barry in his ' History of the Orkney Islands,' which appeared 

 in the following year. Negative evidence like this, however, may 

 not carry much weight. Low, who died in 1795, but whose 

 natural history manuscript was not published till 1813, remarks 

 as follows: "I have often inquired about the Great Auk espe- 

 cially, but cannot find it is ever seen here;" t yet nearly twenty 

 years later, it was found by Mr Bullock, who was but a casual 



* Trans. Nat. Hist. Soc., Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 1832. 

 t Fauna Orcadensis, page 107. 



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