

THE BRITISH PELICAN 85 



bling and screaming, instead of every bird trying to 

 catch as many as he can for himself. It is very differ- 

 ent with the gannet ; he never in all his life and it 

 may be a life of a century or longer for all we know 

 to the contrary wastes as much energy as would be 

 the equivalent of a single feather's weight in trying 

 to take a morsel out of the beak of another gannet 

 or bird of any kind. One might say that his faculties 

 are so perfect, his power so great, that he has no need 

 to descend to such courses. Indeed, so admirably is 

 he fitted for his sea life, that when we view him in 

 very bad weather, when he is travelling, following the 

 coastline, in an everlasting succession of beautiful 

 curves and wave-like risings and fallings ; and when 

 he is fishing, even when the sky is black with tem- 

 pests and the tumbling ocean is all grey and white 

 with whirling spindrift ; when the furious wind has 

 blown the whole tribe of gulls inland many a league, 

 he appears to us as a part of it all of wave and 

 spray and wind and cloud a fragment, one of a 

 million, torn away by the blast, into which a guiding 

 spirit or intelligent principle or particle has been 

 blown to make it cohere and give it form and weight 

 and indestructibility. 



I can but express it in my blundering fashion, but 

 the thought has been in my mind when, sitting on 

 a rock on some high foreland, I have watched the 

 gannets passing by the hour, travelling to some dis- 

 tant feeding area or to their breeding haunts in the 

 far north ; a procession many a league long, but 

 a very thin procession of twos and twos, every bird 



