TEANSACTIONS. 



SESSION 1907-1908. 



1.—THE BIRD LIFE OF AN OUTER ISLAND. 

 By Mr J. C. ADAM. 



{Communicated, Nov. 27, 1907.) 



Our island lies in the Atlantic — an insignificant, unknown 

 fragment in the far-flung archipelago of the Outer Hebrides. 

 We sought it because it was remote, unhackneyed, unex- 

 ploited by the bird-book makers, holding out the fascination of 

 virgin ground. It lies a dozen miles from a steamer port, and 

 the final stage of your journey has to be accomplished, after 

 the manner of Dr Johnson, in an open boat. Dr Johnson 

 would have made a good deal of that. "This is now the 

 Atlantic," Boswell records him saying on one occasion during 

 the famous tour, " and if I should tell at tea-table in London 

 that I have crossed the Atlantic in an open boat, how they'd 

 shudder, and what a fool they'd think me to expose myself to 

 such danger." Dr Johnson, I say, would have made a good 

 deal of it, and so do we, if from different motives. Nearly 

 130 years have passed since Dr Johnson's day, and there is 

 still no change, no improvement in the means of communica- 

 tion between the islands which lie beyond or out of the track 

 of steamers ; and this of course is deplorable. But for the 

 three who figure in this narrative, nine-tenths of the fasci- 



VOL. VI. A 



