Birds. 



8127 



Going to the spot I picked up a radius, also of a gare-fowl, the first 

 we had found anywhere. We carefully examined the locality on two 

 other occasions, and found remains which must have belonged to at 

 least eight individual birds. Many of them bore marks of the knife, 

 and nearly all were in good preservation. They were chiefly lying 

 under stones, which seemed once to have formed an old boundary- 

 wall, and had probably been contained in the turf from some still 

 more ancient rubbish-heap with which the wall had been built up. 

 Just on this spot the sea appears to have encroached, and in this 

 manner laid bare the two bones whose discovery led to the detection 

 of the rest. Among the specimens we collected there are several in 

 which certain differences, probably the result of age or sex, are 

 observable. I do not intend to describe them now. I will merely 

 remark that the great auk is rendered incapable of flight by the modi- 

 fication of the extremities only of its wings. While its humerus is in 

 proportion with the bulk of the body, and fully twice the length that 

 it is in the razorbill, the ulna, radius and metacarpus are nearly the 

 same length in both species, only much thickened in the gare- 

 fowl.* 



It will be gathered from what has been above said that I think there 

 is yet a chance of the great auk still existing in Iceland. At all events 

 until it is proved that he is not to be found on the Geirfugladrangr, 

 I think he must not be despaired of ; but 1 know of no other locality 

 where he is likely to be. The numerous islets in the Breida-fjordr 

 which have been suggested as affording him possibly a last station, 

 are, I believe, visited every year by people from the neighbourhood. 

 Those who imagine he may be on the opposite coast of Greenland 

 are, I am sure, doomed to disappointment. That shore is almost 

 always beset with ice, and, dive admirably as the bird may, I have yet 

 to learn that he can remain under water as long as a seal or a walrus. 

 His then would be a poor sort of existence among closely-packed floes 

 and crashing mountains of ice. Along the coast of Labrador nothing 

 has been lately heard of him that I know of, and yet, if I am rightly 

 informed, it is pretty generally every year visited by fishermen of 

 various nations. The formerly known breeding-places in the Gulf of 



* Mr. Edward Blyth gives a few interesting particulars about some hones of Alca 

 impennis in the ' Proceedings of the Zoological Society' for 1837 (p. 122). I think it 

 is likely enough that the specimens he examined were extracted from the skins pre- 

 pared in 1834 by Jomfrue Lewer, which I have mentioned. At all events, that lady 

 seems to have left more of the bones in the skins she prepared than is the custom with 

 other performers in Iceland. 



