Tue ZooLocGist—JANUARY, 1875. 4273 
by those who know the two birds, the ducks never like to associate 
with the shag or green cormorant, and indeed entertain a strong 
antipathy to it; so that when sillacks, the young of the coal-fish 
(Merlangus carbonarius) chance to be unusually abundant in the 
voes, the shags assembling in great numbers completely scare away 
the ducks.” 
Dr. Saxby’s accounts of the feeding and breeding habits of the 
merganser are such as will rescue Natural History, for a time at 
least, from the charge that it is a science of words and not of facts ; 
and great is the amount of our indebtedness to him, and men like 
him who have now and then tried to exhibit the combined faculties 
of knowing “how to observe” and “how to record.” The sight of 
male mergansers basking on isolated rocks and slumbering in the 
sunshine while their mates are on the nest, quietly engaged in the 
maternal duty of incubation, is one that few of us southerners can 
hope to enjoy: nevertheless the bird is not unknown to us, for 
Mr. Yarrell tells us that in Kent they are called “sawbills,” an 
evidence that they must at least be familiar to those who use so 
descriptive a name. It has not been my good fortune to make their 
acquaintance in the open, but although this has never happened, 
and in all probability never will happen, no one can deprive me of 
the intense pleasure of reading such passages as these, and of 
feeling them to be as truthful as they are enjoyable. 
«When mergansers are feeding in water too shallow for diving they are 
not very easily distinguished at a distance, owing to their habit of keeping 
the head almost constantly submerged, leaving nothing in sight but the 
back—a mark altogether inconspicuous among the numerous small seaweed- 
covered rocks just rising above the surface. I have seen one swimming 
round the rocks, with its head and neck under water, searching for fish 
among the weeds, and on its discovering a fish at a depth, it has dived in- 
stantly, without previously raising the head to take breath: after swallowing 
a fish, which is always first brought to the surface, the bird raises the fore 
part of its body, flaps its wings, and then takes a drink of salt water, raising 
its bill like a common fowl. In deep water the merganser will remain below 
sufficiently long to enable a boat to sail up within shot, but it is very 
seldom that such a chance occurs, one bird or more being constantly in 
sight: not that I have any faith whatever in the popular belief as to a 
regular system of watching being kept up, each individual in turn acting as 
sentry. The fact is that most of the flock dive and rise almost simultaneously, 
but as soon as one catches a fish it takes it to the surface, and either by 
delaying to swallow it, or by finishing the process rapidly and diving again 
