XIV. INTRODUCTION. 



ded, from its southern extremity the Lindesness, or Naze, 

 to the North Cape, that opposes itself to the Frozen Ocean. 

 The Hebrides, or Western Scottish Isles, are also well 

 known to be a principal rendezvous to sea-fowl, and cele- 

 brated as such by Thomson : 



"Or where the northern ocean, in vast whirls, 

 " Boils round the naked melancholy isles 

 "Of farthest Thule ; and the Atlantic surge 

 " Pours in among the stormy Hebrides: 

 " Who can recount what transmigrations there 

 " Are annual made? What nations come and go ? 

 "And how the living clouds on clouds arise? 

 " Infinite wings! till all the plume-dark air, 

 "And rude resounding shore, are one wild cry." 



Other parts of the world the bleak shores and isles of 

 Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Green- 

 land, &c., with the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, are also 

 enlivened in their seasons by swarms of sea-fowl, which range 

 the intervening open parts of the seas to the shoreless frozen 

 ocean. There a barrier is put to further enquiry, beyond 

 which the prying eye of man must not look, and there his 

 imagination only mus,t take the view, to supply the place of 

 reality. In these forlorn regions of unknowable dreary space, 

 this reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the 

 accumulations of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine 

 heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the 

 multiplied rigours of extreme cold: even here, as far as 

 human intelligence has been able to penetrate, there appears 

 to subsist an abundance of animals, in the air, and in the 

 waters: and, perhaps, it may not be carrying conjecture too 

 far to suppose that every region of the earth, air, and water, 

 however ungenial the clime may appear to us, is replete with 

 animals, suited, each kind, to the place assigned to it. 



Certain it is, however, that the deeps of the frozen zone 

 are the great receptacle whence the finny tribes issue, in so 



