NOTES AND QUERIES. 157 



As it is not possible yet to define the problem of the first outward 

 movements, no solution of the problem can be given, and incidentally 

 no answers to Mr. Barrington's questions, except in so far as the 

 means of keeping a true course is concerned. This faculty, which 

 appears to me to have a similar mechanism in both outward and 

 return movements, I have discussed in my paper published in the 

 February issue of this journal. — J. M. Dewar (Lauriston Place, 

 Edinburgh). 



Coots Infested with Vermin. — In Kent it is a common expression, 

 " As lousy as a Coot ! " I recently saw four of these birds shot, and 

 in every case vermin, in appearance like small lice, were found on the 

 dead birds. Can you or your readers inform me whether it is the 

 invariable rule for these birds to be verminous, or was this merely 

 chance ? It is well known that any bird under certain conditions 

 will become verminous, but I thought that the expression and my 

 experience might mean that all Coots were so. — Harold S. Carlton 

 (Forest Hill, S.E.). 



Willughby's Plate of the Gannet. — The letter from Thomas 

 Pennant to the Eev. Dr. Borlase, communicated by Mr. Aplin (Zool. 

 p. 69), is most interesting, but one is inclined to think Pennant rather 

 severe in his strictures on Willughby's picture of the Gannet, which 

 really is pretty good. Most likely it was drawn from the example 

 which Willughby records to have been picked up alive at Coleshill, in 

 Warwickshire, and which very possibly was kept for a time, for the 

 shortness of the abraded tail is indicative of a bird in confinement. 

 Pennant's own illustration, as Mr. Aplin justly remarks, is also good, 

 which might be expected seeing that it is the work of the clever 

 draughtsman George Edwards. Edwards perhaps, for some reason, 

 was not allowed to reproduce it in his quarto ' Gleanings of Natural 

 History' (1743-64), as the Gannet finds no place there. The plate 

 in ' The British Zoology,' which represents a Gannet in the act of 

 plunging, was afterwards copied by Bonnaterre in the ' Tableau 

 Encyclopedique Meth.' (1790). If intended for an adult bird, it is 

 rather too dark, and the claws, on one of which in each foot the 

 serrations are shown, are too long. — J. H. Gurney (Keswick Hall, 

 Norwich). 



PISCES. 



Comber Wrass at Great Yarmouth. — On April 1st a shrimper 

 brought me two small fishes that had been captured in his net the 

 day previously, off the town. He remarked that he had caught two 

 exactly like them last year, " but had lost them somehow," so he 



