ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION IN ICELAND. 101 



bought the right of watching this eyrie, the eggs would, as a 

 certainty, have been seized, and that, before leaving, I purchased 

 for the birds, the right of bringing off their young, the following 

 spring, should their eggs then prove fertile. No one, knowing 

 this, can collect them, now, except through such dishonourable 

 methods as must quite dim the lustre of the exploit. 



June 9th. — After breakfast and another more substantial 

 meal, close following it — for in Iceland they practise the food- 

 cure — I start with Sigurdsson for the Swans. Above the third 

 waterfall, the river widens into a small lake, and on an island 

 not so small in proportion to it we see, as we approach, one of 

 the pair — most probably the female — steadily engaged in incuba- 

 tion. As she sits, gleaming white, on the top of a great mass of 

 brown, with her long neck upstretched, and the yellow of the bill 

 brightly showing, it is impossible to help thinking what a 

 splendid example of concealing coloration such a species must 

 be, whenever a white mist conceals everything. Otherwise, 

 however — and to-day it is otherwise — it would be hard to 

 conceive anything more pleasingly conspicuous. It should be 

 remembered, however, that in a country like Iceland white mists 

 must be far from infrequent, even in the summer, whilst in 

 winter they probably predominate, at which time their effect, in 

 this connection, would be largely aided by snowstorms, but still 

 more effectively, perhaps, by the bird leaving the country. In 

 this last, we no doubt see an adaptation to particular circum- 

 stances of the same general law, since nothing is more salient 

 than white, in the dark, and there is a good deal of mist, south 

 of Iceland. 



Just at present, however, there is no mist in Iceland itself, or, 

 at any rate, not in this part of it, and so there, as a consequence, 

 the Swan sits and gleams, and is, in fact, so very conspicuous 

 that, without turning round and looking in the opposite direction, 

 it is difficult to see any part of the landscape except in some 

 sort of reference to this telling white spot on it. A Swan, in 

 fact, thus fixed by her duties, becomes soon, to one's seeming 

 through her whiteness and brightness, as the centre of a world 

 that radiates out from her, and only through such a nucleus 

 enjoys harmony and a proper relation of parts to the whole and 

 one another. The principle of order, as also of love, in the 



