392 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
egg), and which, from its incapacity for flight, must always have 
been more or less at the mercy of its enemies, especially those who, 
having discovered a breeding-colony (as on Funk Island), ruth- 
lessly slaughtered all they could. 
These no doubt have been the chief causes of its extinction. 
Prof. Steenstrup is of opinion that we should also take into 
consideration the fact that some of the nesting-places of this bird 
have been liable to violent natural disturbances, in which circum- 
stance he sees at least a subsidiary cause of the Garefowl’s 
decrease in, and disappearance from, a few places, as, for instance, 
the Gerfugl Rocks off Iceland. 
The result of Mr. Grieve’s labours (as embodied in the present 
volume) to collect and arrange all the materials available for a 
history of this remarkable seafowl will be most acceptable to 
ornithologists, although we cannot say that the arrangement of 
matter is so good as it might have been, or that it is altogether 
free from inaccuracies. We could point out a few errors, 
typographical and otherwise, and perhaps supply a few references 
to passages in other works which Mr. Grieve apparently has not 
consulted, as, for example, a passage in Wallis’s ‘ History of 
Northumberland,’ 1769 (vol. i., p. 8340), and a paper, by the late 
Dr. Charlton, published in the ‘Transactions of the Tyneside 
Natural History Society,’ and afterwards reprinted in ‘The 
Zoologist’ for 1860. 
The paper on the Great Auk, by Prof. James Orton, to which 
Mr. Grieve refers as being ‘cut out of some scientific Magazine 
or the Proceedings of a Society,” adding that he ‘does not know 
its source,’ may be found in the ‘American Naturalist,’ vol. iii., 
pp. 589—542. The footnote to this paper (p. 540), very briefly 
alluded to by Mr. Grieve, was not penned, as he supposes, by 
Prof. Orton, but by Mr. F. W. Putnam, one of the editors of the 
journal in question. It is worth quoting in full :— 
“That the Great Auk was once very abundant on our New England 
shores is proved beyond a doubt by the large number of its bones that 
have been found in the ancient ‘shell-heaps’ scattered along the coast 
from British America to Massachusetts. The ‘old hunter’ who told 
Audubon of its having been found at Nahunt was undoubtedly correct 
in his statement, as we have bones of the species taken from the shell- 
heaps of Marblehead, Eaglehill in Ipswich, and Plumb Island; and 
Mr. Elliot Cabot has informed me that an old fisherman living in Ipswich 
