24 
st.iting, that one of these birds had been obtained on the long 
strand of Castle Freke (on tlie west of the county of Cork), 
having been water-soaked in a storm.” Lastly, I\rr. Thompson has 
little doubt that two Great Auks were seen in Belfast Bay on the 
23rd of September, 1845, by H. Bell, a wild-fowl shooter, whoso 
good observation, he says, has already more than once been alluded 
to. Ihese are the last individuals of the race suptiosed to have 
been seen on tlie Irish coast. In the Faroes the Gare-fowl became 
extinct early in the present century. In Iceland the Avriter of the 
article entitled “The Gare-foAvl and its Historians,” in the ‘Hatural 
History Eeview,’ for October, 1865, thus concludes a summary 
of what is believed to be its final extinction in that locality “ In 
tlie spring of 1830, a submarine eruption took place off Pteykjanes, 
during which the [Gierfuglasker] skerry completely sank under 
water, and, immediately after a colony of Gare-fowls Avas discovered 
on another rock lying nearer the mainland, and knoAvn as Eldejn 
In the course of the next fourteen years, their numbers annually 
dAvindling, probably not less than sixty of these birds Avere killed 
on the newly selected locality, and it is from this source that 
nearly all the specimens of skins and eggs of the species now 
exhibited in A'arious collections AV'ere derived. The A'cry last 
captured (two in number) AA^ere taken alive at the beginning of 
June, 1844. They were sent to the Poyal Museum at Copenhagen, 
and preparations of their bodies may be seen preserved in spirits in 
that clt 3 ^” Of Greenland, as a home for the Gare-foAvl — the only sure 
evidence is that adduced by Herr Preyer from an old Icelandic 
record— everything else tends to shoAV it Avas but an occasional 
straggler thither ; but in Newfoundland it seems to have existed 
in great numbers, and the islands where they bred were visited year 
after year by the ships frequenting these seas, and the poor stupid 
biifis were driven into their boats and salted down to provision the 
ships. Thus, ruthlessly destroyed in the breeding season it is not 
surprising that Auspach Avriting in 1819 (‘ History of Newfound- 
land,’ p. 393), should speak, as do all the authors who have 
succeeded him on the same subject, of the “Penguin” as extirpated 
in this quarter (Nat. Hist. Pev. p. 483). The last Gare-fowl said 
