8128 



Birds. 



St. Lawrence and off the coast of Newfoundland are ascertained to be 

 abandoned, and no wonder when we think of the annual massacres 

 which used to be committed there.* Yet there may be still 66 some 

 happier island in the watery waste" to which the penguins of the 

 western seas may have escaped ; but then, we may rely upon it, there 

 is left a scanty remnant only. 



I have been informed by my good friend Colonel Drummond-Hay, 

 that in December, 1852, in passing over the tail of the Newfoundland 

 banks, he saw what he fully believes to have been a great auk. At 

 first he thought it was a northern diver ; but he could see the large 

 bill and white patches, which left no doubt on his mind. The bird 

 dived within thirty or forty yards of the steamer. The same gentle- 

 man also has sent me a letter received by him in 1854 from the late 

 Mr. J. MacGregor, of St. John's, Newfoundland, in which he encloses 

 a succinct account of the former wanton destruction of these birds by 

 the fishermen, — the heaps of bones and the "pounds" now to be seen 

 on some of their old breeding-places, — and states that in the preceding 

 year (1853) a dead one was picked up in Trinity Bay. My inquiries 

 about this specimen have not yet resulted in obtaining any further 

 information respecting it.t 



* I am under the necessity of dissenting from the opinion expressed by Professor 

 Owen, in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, April 12, 1859, and repeated in 

 his article on ' Palaeontology,' as republished in a separate form from the ' Encyclo- 

 paedia Britannica' (p. 400). To the destruction which the great auk has experienced 

 at the hands of man, must, I am confident, its gradually increasing scarcity be 

 attributed. Granting that it does require very peculiar breeding-places to be fit and 

 favourable for it, we only know of the disappearance of one such in the whole extent 

 of its range, which in comparatively modern times reached from Cape Cod to Papa 

 Westra, while on every other known breeding-place it has, from the earliest date, been 

 the especial object of search. 



f While on the subject of the bird's occurrence in this part of the world, 1 wish to 

 remark on Mr. Cassin's statement in Professor Baird's ' Birds of America' (p. 901), 

 touching the great auk " figured by Mr. Audubon, and obtained by him on the banks 

 of Newfoundland" &c. Now in 1857 I was assured by Mr. Bell, the well-known 

 taxidermist at New York, who knew Mr. Audubon intimately, that he never possessed 

 but one specimen of this bird ; and if we turn to Professor MacGillivray's ' History of 

 British Birds' (vol. v. p. 359), we find him saying that he never saw but two examples 

 of the species, one in the British Museum, and " the other belonging to Mr. Audubon, 

 and -procured by him in London." I have also to set right a mistake made on this 

 side of the water. In their Catalogue of Norfolk and Suffolk Birds, printed in the 

 ' Linnean Transactions' (xv. p. 61), Messrs. Shepherd and Whitear say, they had been 

 told by Sir William Hooker that a great auk had been " killed near Southwold" in 

 the latter county. That eminent botanist, however, has most kindly informed me 

 that not only has he no recollection of any such occurrence, but, having taken some 



