DESTRUCTION FOR FOOD 147 



some hundreds for preserving their Fowls, Eggs, &c. They use no Salt for 

 preserving their Fowl, the Eggs of the Sea Wild-Fowl are preserved some 

 months in the Ashes of Peats, and are astringent to such as be not 

 accustomed to eat them. 



Even on the small area of the Bass Rock as many as 1300 

 Gannets were slaughtered yearly in the latter half of the 

 eighteenth century, their products being valued at some 

 ^120; and the destruction of man has altogether driven this 

 interesting bird from Lundy Island, a former haunt on the 

 coast of Wales. That the Gannets caught on the Bass were 

 widely used for food is indicated by the following advertise- 

 ment from the Edinburgh Advertiser of Aug. 5, 1 768 : 



"SOLAN GOOSE. 



"There is to be sold, by JOHN WATSON, Jun. at his Stand at the Poultry, 

 Edinburgh, all lawfull days in the week, wind and weather serving, good 

 and fresh Solan Geese. Any who have occasion for the same may have 

 them at reasonable rates." 



The reasonable rate was about "twenty-pence apiece," but 

 the old birds were said to have had a flavour too rank and 

 fishy for the average palate, so that only young or newly 

 fledged chicks were commonly eaten. They "used to be 

 considered as excellent provocatives." 



The Fulmar Petrel (Fulmarus glacialis], a bird which 

 is annually increasing its range at the present day, also paid 

 heavy toll at the hands of the people of St Kilda. 



"Can the world" said one of the most intelligent inhabitants to the 

 Rev. Mr Macaulay in 1758, "exhibit a more valuable commodity ? The 

 Fulmar furnishes oil for the lamp, down for the bed, the most salubrious 

 food, and tfce most efficacious ointments for healing wounds, besides a 

 thousand other virtues of which he is possessed which I have not time to 

 enumerate. But to say all in one word, deprive us of the Fulmar, and St 

 Kilda is no more." 



"Of the fowls themselves," Macaulay tells us, "every family 

 has a great number salted in casks for winter provisions, and 

 the amount of the whole is about twelve barrels." At the 

 present day the Fulmar has entirely replaced the Gannet in 

 the economy of St Kilda. 



