456 Anatidce. 



described it in his day (at the beginning of the present century) 

 as ' frequently killed upon the Downs in the south of England, 

 feeding on green wheat,' and he adds, ' We remember one, being 

 shot in the wing by a farmer, in the neighbourhood of the Wilt- 

 shire Downs, was kept alive many years, but would never 

 associate with the tame ones/ In more recent days the late 

 Rev. George Marsh informed me that two or three fine specimens 

 of this bird were killed on the river Avon by Mr. Ferris, of Sutton 

 Benger, in the very severe winter of 1838, and doubtless it is 

 still occasionally met with in hard weather. It is to be dis- 

 tinguished from its congeners by the pink flesh-colour of its 

 beak, legs, and feet, the nail of the beak being white. Mr. 

 Harting says it has also invariably some black feathers on the 

 belly, which the other species lack, and the gray colour in the 

 wings of the Gray Lag runs through the wing like a double bar, 

 which is very conspicuous when the pinions are stretched.* The 

 meaning and derivation of the word lag was for a long time a 

 puzzle to many. Yarrell conjectured it to come from the 

 English lake or Italian lago, both derived from the Latin lacus ; 

 but in 1870 Professor Newton, the then editor of the Ibis, with 

 the able assistance of Professor Skeat, unravelled the mystery, 

 and set the question at rest for ever. ' The adjective " lag," ' he 

 says, ' means originally " late," " last," or " slow," whence we have 

 " laggard " and " laglast," a " loiterer," etc. Accordingly the 

 Gray Lag Goose is the Gray Goose which in former days lagged 

 behind the others to breed in our fens, as it now does on the 

 Sutherland lochs, when its congeners had betaken themselves to 

 their more northern summer quarters.'-)- Most certainly it did 

 not imply any inferiority to either of its congeners in rapidity of 

 flight, for, like them, it is very strong and powerful on the wing, 

 and fifty or sixty miles an hour is the rate at which they are 

 said to fly. We who live in this inland western county have 

 little conception of the large flocks of domesticated geese derived 

 from this species which are still brought up in the fen districts 



'Birds of Middlesex,' p. 216. 

 t Ilia for 1870, p. 301. 



