1892-93.] 
Dr C. W. Donald on Penguins. 
in 
balance and sways forwards ; hurrying on, he soon loses his balance 
altogether and topples forward on to his breast, in which attitude he 
progresses at an even more rapid pace, the flippers being used alter- 
nately as paddles, and the feet pushing behind, the tail in this pos- 
ture not touching the ground. In the water his modes of progression 
are also two : usually he is seen to swim under water in a prolonged 
dive, broken at intervals of about 30 yards, as he rises for breath, 
leaping clean out of the water to the height of perhaps a foot, and 
immediately disappearing with scarcely a ripple, after clearing a 
space of about 2 to 2|- feet. Swimming in this way the feet remain 
motionless, and only the flippers act as powerful paddles ; in this 
manner the bird shoots along with great rapidity. The other mode 
of swimming develops but a slow pace ; floating on the surface like 
a cormorant, he swims in the ordinary way by means of his webbed 
feet, his wings remaining idle. On leaving the water for the ice, 
lie shoots straight up from below the surface, and lands in an erect 
position ; in this way he can jump on to a piece of ice as much as 
2J feet above the water-line. 
In Lieutenant Spry’s notes on the voyage of the “ Challenger,” 
he states, as the result of an experiment, that a penguin perished 
on being held under water for the space of one and a half minutes. 
To test this statement I repeated the experiment, and held a 
penguin below the surface for the space of 6 minutes. At the end 
of 2 minutes, among other violent struggles, convulsive pumping 
movements of the chest occurred ; these were repeated at the end 
of 4J minutes, and again immediately before I released the bird. 
Though considerably exhausted, it recovered satisfactorily, and was 
set at liberty half an hour afterwards. To account for this dis- 
crepancy in the two results, I may say that I carefully excluded 
water from the lungs by compressing the trachea ; whereas in 
Lieutenant Spry’s experiment, the bird was simply lowered below 
the surface in a lobster creel. 
On one occasion (January 5), in the north of the Erebus and 
Terror Gulf, we had an opportunity of seeing the birds swimming 
in large schools of from 200 to 300, the movements of the school 
* The Cruise of H.M.S. Challenger f by W. J. Spry, R.N., p. 96:— “The 
bird was found quite dead at the end of 4 minutes, and subsequent experi- 
ments showed that 1^ minutes was sufficient to kill it.” 
