172 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



near Pwllheli, and stated in the catalogue, but erroneously, to 

 be the only Welsh-killed specimen. 



Puffin. — The evidence that the Puffin formerly bred on 

 Bardsey, to be found in Eay's ' Itineraries,' is certainly stronger 

 than I thought it was. Piay and Willughby were both at Aber- 

 daron, and crossed over to Bardsey ("a pretty little spot, rented 

 for £50 per annum ") on May 29th, 1662 ; and the former states : 

 " There build the Prestholm puffin, sea-pies, and some other 

 birds." He doubtless knew the Puffin by sight, for just a week 

 before he had landed on Puffin (or, as he calls it, Prestholm) 

 Island, he records that " in the island (Prestholm) are bred 

 several sorts of birds, two sorts of sea-gulls, cormorants, puffins, 

 so called there, which I take to be Anas arctica clusii, razor-bills 

 and guillems, scrays two sorts, which are a kind of gull." 

 Scrays are Terns — " a name, I conceive, framed in imitation of 

 their cry : For they are extraordinarily clamorous " (vide Wil- 

 lughby's 'Ornithology'). When at Pwllheli, Eay records that 

 " They have a tradition in Wales about the puffins, that they 

 cannot fly if they be out of sight of the sea-water ; their wings 

 are very small, and yet they fly swiftly, but seldom very high." 

 C. F. Cliffe, who in or slightly earlier than 1850 visited Bardsey, 

 says that the very precipitous seaward face of the hill on the 

 north-east was " in summer a great resort of puffins and other 

 sea-birds." But, although Cliffe often mentions the sea-birds of 

 Wales, there is nothing to show that he had any especial know- 

 ledge of ornithology. If the birds were only seen at a distance 

 it would be easy for a casual observer to mistake a row of Guille- 

 mots or those birds on the sea for Puffins, the name of which, 

 then as now, seemed to come more readily to the local people's 

 mouths than those of the other Auks. Bardsey, of course, might 

 have held a Puffin-warren in the latter half of the seventeenth 

 century (though I do not think it very likely), and been after- 

 wards deserted. But I cannot understand how, if the birds were 

 there as late as fifty years ago, I never heard anything of them. 

 Still it may have been so. Information does not come readily 

 to an Englishman from people who talk little of his language, 

 and dislike it also. Ray, indeed, great naturalist that he was, 

 always concerned himself more with plants than birds, and it is 

 interesting to find that he noticed the abundance of the pretty 



