141



THE


Avicultural Magazine,


BEING THE JOURNAL OF

THE AVICULTURAL SOCIETY.



Third Series. —Yol. IX.—No. 5 .—All rights reserved. MARCH, 1918.



MOBILIS IN MOBILE.


“ Mobile in a mobile element. This applied exactly to this submarine machine,

if you translate the preposition ‘in’ as ‘in,’ and not ‘upon.’”— Jules

Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.


The foregoing description also applies exactly to the fine

group of Penguins forming the frontispiece to this month’s

1 Avicultural.’ Perfect swimmers and divers, they may well be

termed the most fish-like of birds. Equally, with their smooth,

shining bodies and magpie coloration, does a troop of swimming

Penguin suggest a school of marvellously small cetaceans. More¬

over, some of the latter (dolphins, for instance) have the muzzle

prolonged into quite a bird-like beak ! Penguin further resemble

cetaceans in having a warm coat of blubber under the skin, and

differ from nearly all other birds in the close setting of their

feathers.


As we saw last month, most birds are not uniformly feathered

all over, but have their plumage arranged in definite tracts, separated

by bare patches or apteria. Penguins have no apteria, save a small

bare patch on the under surface, to allow the sitting bird to satis¬

factorily incubate her egg. The feathers themselves are most

remarkable, recalling the scales of reptiles, and on the forearm are

even moulted in a sheet, like the skin of a snake.


A well-known locality for the Cape or Jackass Penguin is


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