ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION IN ICELAND. 419 



My reason for not staying and watching these Divers for, at 

 least, another day, was that Sigurdsson had lately heard of a 

 pair of Jer-Falcons— that splendid member of a high family, 

 peculiar to Iceland, and soon to become extinct, even there, 

 owing to every kind of persecution being ceaselessly practised 

 against it, but chiefly there can be no doubt (since qui facit per 

 alium facit per se) scientific collecting, both with gun and 

 hands, on which, apparently, there is no check, and which falls, 

 according to the particular kind of life-taking preferred by 

 each class of collector, on the mature bird, the eggs, and 

 the down-clothed young in the nest. Add to this, capture * 

 for captivity, poison — whether put down for Foxes only, 

 or on the " with-one-stone " principle — and the undisguised 

 gunning barbarian, ready to supply all parties — as witness 

 the shops in Eeykjavik, now the bird's principal habitat, at 

 any rate in the south — and it becomes apparent that the end 

 cannot be much longer delayed, unless some peculiarly energetic 

 and quite unexpected effort is made by a Government which 

 cares little or nothing for its bird-life, in general, or (when not 

 on a banner or bank-note) for this, the chosen national emblem 

 of the country which it represents. Yet in the eyes, at any 

 rate, of the more tasteful part of the outside world, this very 

 bird fauna, thus neglected and thrown to the Philistines, makes, 

 with her unique scenery, one of the two great charms which that 

 country possesses. These reflections (not national but only 

 governmental) may be permitted to one whose own Parliament 

 refuses to pass a law preventing the importation of bird plumage, 

 though the most beautiful and interesting birds of the world are 

 perishing (to the point of approaching extinction) in consequence 

 of that refusal, by ways the most cruel and for purposes the 

 most trivial and contemptible. With so chastened a conscious- 

 ness, they can hardly be thought admonitorial. 



The place where the Falcons of which Sigurdsson had re- 

 ceived information were supposed to have nested was a long 

 day's journey from where we now were. The man on whose 

 land the eyrie was situated was not known to him personally, 

 and there were some other elements of uncertainty which grew, 



* The inaccessibility of. the nest is a myth. It is always accessible so • 

 long as a rope (wrongly used) and a purchaser is. 



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