The Zoologist — November, 1868. 1447 



Rev. M. A. Mathews by the Rev. H. G. Heaven, of Lundy, and was 

 printed in the 'Zoologist' for 1866 (p. 100). Although highly inte- 

 resting, it must be received cum grano salis : — 



" Lundy Island, September 6, 1865. — With regard to your question 

 whether we have ever seen the great auk, I must answer in the 

 negative. There is strong presumptive evidence, however, that the 

 great auk has been seen alive on the island within the last thirty 

 years ; at least I cannot imagine what other bird it was. The facts 

 are as follows, and I must leave it to more experienced ornithologists 

 to draw the conclusion : — In the year 1838 or 1839, as nearly as I 

 can recollect, — not, however, more recently, — one of our men in the 

 egging season brought us an enormous egg, which we took for an 

 abnormal specimen of the guilleiuot's egg, or. as they are locally 

 named, the ' picked-billed murr.' This, however, the man strenuously 

 denied, saying it was the egg of the 'king and queen murr,' and that 

 it was very rare to get them, as there were only two or three 'king 

 and queen murrs ' ever on the island. On being further questioned 

 he said they were not like the 'picked-bills,' but like the 'razor- 

 billed murrs' (*. e., the razorbilled auk) ; that they were much larger 

 than either of them ; and he did not think they could fly, as he never 

 saw them on the wing nor high up the cliffs like the other birds, and 

 that they, as he expressed it, ' scuttled ' into the water, tumbling 

 among the boulders, the egg being only a little way above high-water. 

 He thought they had deserted the island, as he had not seen them or 

 an egg for (I believe) fifteen years till the one he brought to us; but 

 that they (i. e., the people of the island) sometimes saw nothing of 

 them for four or five years,* but he accounted for this by supposing 

 the birds had fixed on a spot, inaccessible to the eggers from the 

 land, for breeding purposes. The shell of the egg we kept for some 

 years, but unfortunately it at last got broken. It was precisely like 

 the guillemot's egg in shape, nearly, if not quite, twice the size, with 

 white ground and black and brown spots and blotches. We have 

 never, however, met with bird or egg since, but as the island has 

 become since that time constantly and yearly more frequented and 

 populous, it may have permanently deserted the place. The man has 

 been dead some years now, being then past middle age, and I think 

 he had been an inhabitant of the island some twenty-five or thirty 

 years. He spoke of the birds in such a way that one felt convinced 



* How precisely this agrees with Kenneth Macaulay's statements respecting the 

 ones at St. Kilda. 



