BY WAY OF APPENDIX. 
201 
Such things have been done, and worse ; but in 
the present state of things, as Baring-Gould some- 
where says in his Book of Were Wolves, those of 
us who have inhuman instincts are no longer per- 
mitted to make victims of their fellow-creatures, 
and are consequently driven to seek them among 
the lower animals that have no law to protect them. 
While on this subject of the extermination of the 
albatross, it is possible, I think, to make one prac- 
tical suggestion. For that this noble bird is being 
exterminated hardly admits of a doubt when one 
calls to mind the fate of the great auk, which was 
common throughout the North Atlantic until recent 
times ; and when we consider how all seas are now 
frequented — infested, one may say — by ships ; and 
that where the detestable cowardly and brutal 
hook-and-line method is not employed, it is a 
favourite pastime of passengers to practise with a 
rifle at the sea-birds. It is true that the sea is no 
man's sea, that it has no close time, no law to give 
a merciful period of rest from persecution to its 
feathered inhabitants ; but it is also true that the 
captains of our large ocean-going steamships are, 
as a rule, gentlemen of humane and cultivated 
minds, who do not themselves take part in this 
cruel and unmanly sport. How comes it then that 
they permit such things in the ships they com- 
mand ? Doubtless the reason is that they are 
