ORDER STEGANOPODES. 161 
more familiar Cormorants, their bodies are more slender, the neck is thin and 
longer, and the beak long and very acuminate, its margins being set with back- 
ward-pointing serrations. The wings are long, and the tail, in which there are 
twelve stiff feathers, is long and rounded; the skin round the eye is naked. The 
legs are set far back, so that the bird when sitting assumes an erect posture. 
The Phalacrocoracide, or Cormorants—which in number of species constitute 
nearly half the Order—are distinguished by their very short upper tail-coverts, and 
the unusually rigid shafts to the feathers of their rather long and fan-shaped tail ; 
by their legs being set far back, which gives the birds their peculiar upright 
position; by the outer toe exceeding the others in length, and the middle one having 
a serrated claw; by the strongly hooked beak and the absence—though the bill has 
a long nasal groove—of nostrils in the adult. Their wings are proportionately 
shorter than in the members of the other families of the Order, while the throat- 
pouch, such a marked character in the Pelicans, is but slightly developed, and is either 
naked or encroached on more or less by feathers. Cormorants’ eggs are rough and 
chalky, with a bluish underground seen between the chalky patches, but are never 
spotted. The sexes are alike in plumage. 
All the Cormorants fly well, but they are more at home in the water than 
in the air. They are expert swimmers and splendid divers, descending occasionally 
to great depths in quest of their food, which consists almost exclusively of fishes. 
They are devoid of the air-sacs under the skin, possessed by other members of 
the Order. 
Their distribution is world-wide. Of the fifty species described up to the 
present, three are European, and only two are British. Beautiful as are the 
European species, they are far excelled by the pure white-breasted forms in S. 
America, S. Africa, and Australasia. 
The Sulide, or Gannets, are distinguished by having the middle pectinated 
toe equal to, or exceeding, the outer toe in length. Two groups are recognized 
in the family—the White Gannets and the Brown, better known as Boobies. The 
latter are more numerous in species than the former, and are distributed round 
the warmer latitudes of the globe, while the White Gannets are found breeding 
only in higher latitudes. In the northern Hemisphere, there is but one species 
of White Gannet or Solan-Goose; in the southern Hemisphere, however, there 
are two, one with its habitat at the Cape of Good Hope /S. cagensis/, the other 
(S. serrator) on the coasts of the Australasian seas. The Gannets are further 
distinguished by having a strip of bare skin down the throat—absent in the 
Brown Gannets, however; by the bill, which is longer than the head, being less 
hooked than among the Cormorants, and the tongue aborted, while the wings and tail 
