The Zoologist— November, 1871. 2823 



to return with the first of the ebb ; keeping each way close in to 

 the cliffs, the better to inspect the breeding-station of the puffins. 

 There was no difficulty in this, with a twenty-one-foot tide washing 

 the base of the rocks, and a sea literally like a polished mirror, for 

 there was not a breath of air to ripple the surface, and, but for that 

 long low heave, like the breathings of a sleeping giant, and the 

 worn and storm-shattered coast, nothing to say we were floating on 

 this proverbially unquiet sea. There had been a week of calm 

 after a wet and stormy summer, and consequently the water was, 

 for Flamborough, unusually clear — in colour a pale emerald, which 

 is the true tint of this northern sea. With the slightest wind the 

 water chafes and fi-ets against the cliff, constantly rubbing off 

 minute particles of chalk, till it stains itself to a milky whiteness. 

 This morning, as we coasted along, the bottom was clearly visible: 

 acres of white, water- worn boulders, or waving with forests of sea- 

 tangle and dulse,— " gardens of Nereus," haunted with many a 

 rare form of life, — for the present, without the modern appliances 

 of a dredge, a sealed book to us. 



After rounding the cliff forming the eastern face of the north 

 landing, we enter a little bay, containing two immense isolated 

 blocks of chalk, better known to the thousands who visit Flam- 

 borough in the summer as the " King and Queen." From this to 

 the lighthouse is the principal breeding-station of the puffins; for, 

 although they are found in considerable numbers along the whole 

 of the northern side of the headland, they appear to resort more 

 particularly to these comparatively lower cliffs, leaving the Speeton 

 precipices to the guillemots, razorbilled auks and kittiwakes. This 

 part of the coast does not average more than eighty to one hundred 

 feet in perpendicular height, and is capped with a receding mass 

 of boulder-clay, or green cliff, forty or fifty feet higher, clothed with 

 flowers such as love the sea-breezes, like the bladder-campion, 

 stonecrop, and short sweet grass, which has lured many an unfor- 

 tunate animal to destruction. The only tenants of the upper cliff 

 are rabbits, wheatears, and rock pipits. The puffins never encroach 

 on the burrows of their four-footed allies, as is the case in many of 

 the northern breeding-stations, but keep entirely to the perpendi- 

 cular cliff, so rugged and broken up by deep rents, fissures and 

 holes, that it would easily give shelter to ten times the number of 

 sea-fowl, legion though they be, now nesting there. The birds 

 have certainly greatly increased since I last paid them a visit. 



