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Notices of New Books. 



this pretty tortoise never having been found in the North of France, 

 Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Swedeq or Norway. 



On the subject of the northern penguin, the great auk of our 

 British lists, Mr. Newton cites from Steenstrup's admirable ' Mono- 

 graph ' several passages of great interest ; and these, in continuation 

 of the delightful paper I have already reprinted in the 4 Zoologist,' 

 will form a very complete history of this truly extraordinary and now 

 probably extinct bird. 



" But the species which is supposed by many ornithologists to be 

 now extinct was formerly very plentiful on both sides of the Atlantic, 

 and even on some islands suited to its necessarily peculiar habits 

 around our coast. The statement of its breeding on St. Kilda, which 

 has been often quoted, is very circumstantial ; and in Orkney there 

 are still persons living who remember it as a native bird, a fact by no 

 means extraordinary, when it is known that the last example observed 

 there was killed in 1812, and its skin sent to Mr. Bullock, at the sale 

 of whose collection it was bought by Dr. Leach for the British 

 Museum, wdiere it may now be seen in very fair preservation. A few 

 of its bones have been discovered in the Danish * Kitchen-Middens,' 

 and this circumstance has led Professor Steenstrup to publish an ex- 

 cellent little monograph on the species. Herein he has most care- 

 fully collected the notices concerning it which exist in the narratives 

 of old voyages to Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And 

 notwithstanding that it may be perhaps somewhat departing from the 

 scope of a paper professedly on European Zoology, I hope it will be 

 permitted me to mention a few of these here. For though most of 

 them are drawn from sources originally published in England, they 

 have never been collated by English naturalists, and they represent a 

 state of things similar in all probability to that which once existed in 

 many localities along the western shores of Europe. 



"In 4 The voyage of M. Hore and diners other gentlemen to New- 

 foundland and Cape Briton in the yeere 1536,' &c, it is stated : — 



" ' From the time of their setting out from Grauesend, they were 

 very long at sea, to witte, aboue two moneths, and neuer touched any 

 land vntill they came to part of the West Indies about Cape Briton, 

 shaping their course thence Northeastwardes, vntill they came to the 

 Island of Penguin, which is very full of rocks and stones, whereon 

 they went and found it full of great foules white and gray, as big as 

 geese, and they Jsaw infinite numbers of their egges. They draue a 

 great number of the foules into their boates vpon the sayles, and 

 tooke up many of their egges, the foules they flead and their skinnes 



