174 CHAPTERS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY 



smaller in size. An old male will measure nearly 30 inches ire 

 length. 



Audubon says: " I once caught one of these birds on the Ohio, 

 it having been incapacitated from diving by having swallowed 

 a large mussel, which stuck in its throat. It was kept for several 

 days, but refused food of every kind, exhibited much bad hunior r 

 struck with its bill, and died of inanition. The food of this spe- 

 cies consists of fish, aquatic reptiles, testaceous mollusca, and all 

 sorts of small crustaceous animals. Its flesh resembles that of 

 the loon, and is equally unfit to be eaten." 



Audubon figures the male, female, and young of this species,, 

 as he does the Loon and the Red-throated diver. These were all 

 the forms of Urinator known to him at the time he completed his 

 great work, as occurring in our waters. Since his time both the 

 Yellow r -billed loon and the Pacific loon have been added. His 

 account of the Great Northern diver is one of the best that has 

 ever been written, and like a good story I have read it many 

 times at varying intervals, but always with the same interest. 



Some authorities group the auks along with the divers, mak- 

 ing the two families constitute the Pygopodes. But such an ar- 

 rangement is not borne out by their morphology, and in my class- 

 ification of birds, I have long ago abandoned it as being unnat- 

 ural. Indeed, some forms of auks are more nearly related to 

 the gulls (Longipennes) than they are to the loons and grebes, 

 as a study of their osteology plainly shows. In short, I make a 

 suborder for the auks and their immediate allies, designating 

 them as the Alcce, as has been done by Sharpe and others. They 

 are birds more or less confined to the circumpolar regions, rarely 

 occurring to the southward. In our United States avifauna they 

 are represented by the puffins, the auklets, the murrelets, the 

 guillemots, the murres, the auks proper, and the Dovekie. Of 

 these several genera the genus Uria or the murres are the most 

 nearly related to the gulls of all the Alcce, while the famous ex- 

 tinct Great Auk was the most lowly organized species of the 

 group and should be awarded a place in accordance in future 

 schemes of avian classification. 



As is well known, the literature and the published figures of 

 the Great Auk are both very extensive, and no doubt every one 

 who will read the present article is more or less familiar with its 

 history. A number of years ago the Smithsonian Institution had 

 collected on the Funk Islands a great quantity of the bones of the 



