632 Mr. J. H. Gurney on the 



immemorial^ which most probably they have done^ for the 

 Ganuet is a very conservative bird. 



Unfortunately, we know but little of the early history 

 of the Stack, that useful writer Donald Munro, who 

 travelled among the Hebrides as a minister in 1549, 

 omitting to include it in his list of Scottish islands. A bare 

 mention of it by Sir Robert Sibbald in 1710 alone proves 

 to the naturalist that Gannets bred there then. In his 

 ' History of the Sheriffdoms of Fife and Kinross,^ this 

 author, who was president of the Edinburgh College of 

 Physicians, says (p. 47): — 



""They are misinformed, who write that these Fowls 

 [Solan Geese] are found nowhere else in Scotland but in 

 the Bass; for they are found in several of the West Isles, 

 particularly in the Isle Ailsa, in the Firth of Clyde, and in 

 the desert isles, adjacent to Hirta, called St. Kilda's Isle, 

 and in a desert isle belonging to Orkney, and divers 

 others." 



The '^isle belonging to Orkney" here mentioned can 

 surely have been no other than the Stack, though not 

 actually known to Sibbald by its proper name. 



As regards the Gannet population of the Stack, there 

 has been a very wide divergence of opinion. Years ago 

 Captain Samuel McDonald of the fishery cruiser ' Vigilant,' 

 who had probably never landed upon the Stack, although 

 he may have been well acquainted with it at a distance, and 

 who seems to have been a man given to exaggeration, 

 assessed its strength at fifty thousand (see ' Report on the 

 Herring-Fisheries of Scotland/ 1878, p. 171), but that it 

 ever attained to such proportions is improbable in the last 

 degree. 



As all we have heard about the numbers of the Gannets 

 at the Stack hitherto has been decidedly vague — even 

 Professor Newton, who was there in 1890, not trusting 

 himself to anything definite — it was with satisfaction that 

 the writer learnt that Her Grace the Duchess of Bedford 

 had paid three visits to the Stack during the past summer, 

 viz., on May 17, June 19 and 22, 1914, for the express 

 purpose of making observations on the Gannets. 



