ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION TN ICELAND. 301 



seeing the cygnets nibbling at something in the water, which 

 must, I think, have been the weeds brought up by the parents, 

 for there was no appearance of any growing weed on the surface. 

 They did so, however, only now and again, and in a casual and 

 desultory way, as if they were learning, and did not clearly con- 

 nect the finding of the weed with the parents getting it for them. 

 As far as I could see, the general plan of the Swans was to keep 

 dropping or leaving the weed (by which last I mean leaving go 

 of it as soon as their heads emerged) about on the water, in a 

 circumscribed area — quite a small space, where they kept all 

 the time — and letting the cygnets find it, as they happened to, 

 but I twice, at least, saw one of them (I think the mother) 

 stretch out her neck towards one or other of the cygnets, and 

 then bring down her bill upon the water. It was funny, some- 

 times, to see the cygnets clustered round the after half of the 

 parent's body, as it stood upright in the air. I twice saw some 

 weed — it must have been a fair quantity — thrown up by the 

 feet of the submerged bird, as she paddled with them vigorously, 

 to maintain her perpendicular attitude ; but I cannot say if this 

 was consciously done or not — probably not, for she must, I 

 think, first have brought it up in her bill. 



Previous to my last expedition, Sigurdsson had told me of a 

 pair of Merlins that had their eyrie in a ravine of one of the 

 mountains hereabouts, and I resolved to make this the next 

 object of my investigation. We started accordingly on the 

 afternoon of the day of my return, and had the tent pitched by 

 about 4.30. The birds had made their home amidst very grim 

 and wild scenery — macabre one might call it, could that be, 

 apart from humanity — which, however, in a way, was repre- 

 sented. The mountain, it need hardly be said, is volcanic, and 

 its black face of igneous precipices, with fragment-strewn slopes 

 at their bases, is rent at irregular intervals by gorges so gloomy 

 and titanic-looking, that to enter any one of them is to leave 

 earth and move amidst a sort of infernal scenery. In one of the 

 gloomiest of these there rose, almost from the centre of the 

 chasm, an irregular prominence, crowned by a huge overjutting 

 mass, the shape of which — with a green eye of lichen, and up- 

 staring bristles of grass — suggested some nightmare-like animal; 

 whilst almost opposite to it, flung out from the cliffs on one side, 



