440 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



began eating the Tystie. Rabot fired at it, but it did not even 

 stop eating; on his firing a second shot it left off eating and 

 washed his beak, as if hit there ; presently — it may have been 

 after another shot — it flew, when he again fired and knocked it 

 over. On picking the birds up we found the wounded gull little 

 the worse, so kept it alive. We went ashore on the west side, 

 and, with the assistance of two men, after considerable work, 

 I succeeded in unearthing — or rather un-icing — a human skull 

 from an old grave, of which there are several by the old Russian 

 house. This grave had been previously opened at the foot 

 by a bear. The skull is probably that of a Russian Fin. All 

 hands agreed that it had probably been buried more than fifty 

 years, — nearer than that we did not venture to guess, — and we 

 were fortunate in having decided tbat it was a Russian, for in 

 the evening the cook brought us our supper, looking extremely 

 solemn, and informed us that being a Russian it was all right, 

 but that if it bad been the skull of a Norwegian or of a Finn 

 (i. e. Laplander) we should never get back to Norway ; and further 

 that the people of Balsund (Balsfjord) in Norway were very 

 dangerous, having witchcraft, and that some of them could pre- 

 vent a vessel getting any "fangst" or shooting any birds, and 

 that the father of Nils (one of our hands, who came from Balsund) 

 had that power, but he did not know whether Nils had it ; he 

 believed it all himself, and said something more about " an old 

 Bible" that I could not catch, but I think it was to the effect 

 tbat this was the means to break the spell. After securing the 

 skull we rowed further north, along that shore, after some Eiders 

 or geese which Rabot had seen while I was digging. We went 

 beyond a great lump of fresh-water ice, twenty feet or so out of 

 the water, which has been in the bay since we arrived. Seeing 

 nothing of the birds, we rowed over to the glacier on the east 

 side, on the chance of seeing the Great Seal again. According 

 te both the English chart and the map published in ' Bidrag 

 till Kaunedom om de Artiska Liindernas Naturforhallanden,' — 

 L, "Utkast till Isfjordens och Belsounds Geologi, af A. E. Nor- 

 denskiold" (1875), — Recherche Bay is entirely surrounded by 

 glacier, except at the N.E. corner; whereas the partial break in 

 the glacier shown at the southernmost point of the bay is an 

 actual division ; and we walked along the west shore, picking up 

 specimens of rock, &c, and finding the old house and graves, &c, 



