EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY. 
CuHaptTer I. 
PREHISTORIC BIRDS. 
Later Stone Age: Prehistoric Drawings. First Observers of Migration. 
Superficial Deposits. 
Bird Remains of the Later Stone Age.—\n commencing with 
the remains of birds attributabie to the Stone Age, it must be 
stated that there is no intention of attempting to investigate 
the voluminous history of that subject in the present volume, 
it is one for which the writer is far from being competent, and 
moreover it is a branch of science which has been repeatedly 
handled by those who have specialised in research of this 
kind, and given the world their discoveries, which are acces- 
sible to all. Certain it is that there are few species of birds 
now living in Europe, be they of the Order Steganopodes or any 
other family, of whose Miocene progenitors anything conclusive 
can be said, still less can the birds of our era be connected 
with that earlier period which is known to geologists as the 
Eocene, but as we approach a more modern epoch, remains of 
birds become much less rare. Many there are which are assign- 
able to the Stone Age, and especially to the Later Stone Age, a 
period comparatively recent, when the prehistoric Briton had 
begun to round off his roughly chipped stone axes and polish 
them with sand. It is to this period, terminating in Britain 
about two thousand years B.c., that the remains of Solan Geese, 
and other birds discovered in a sea-cave in Durham, belong ; 
also some fragments of Solan Geese which were found in 1913 
(together with bones of the Great Auk, Razorbill, Guillemot, 
Cormorant, Shag, Swan, Wild Goose, Merganser, Gull, Tern, 
and Water-Rail) by Mr. Ludovic Mann in the Asilian or 
Mesolithic shell-mounds of Oronsay, an island on the west 
coast of Scotland. 
These mounds, in Mr. Mann’s opinion, represent the oldest 
known inhabited sites in North Britain, and their age is 
B 
