Mr. Steven.^oii tells me he is satisfied the guillemots and gulls seen 
feeding in Yarmouth and Lowestoft roads during the breeding sea- 
son, come from the great nesting places on the Yorkshire coast, and 
Mr. Yarrell * states, on the authority of Dr. Jenner and Rev. 
Nathaniel 'rhornbury, that the domestic pigeons about the Hague, 
“ make daily marauding excursions, at certain seasons of the year, to 
the opposite shore of Norfolk, to feed on vetches, a distance of 
forty leagues.” 
Sir Thomas Browne, whose keen ob.servation nothing e.scaped, 
speculated in his “Hawks and Falconry” on the “swiftness of the 
hawk,” and “the measure of their flight ”... and ad<ls, “ how far the 
hawks, merlins, and wild fowl, which come unto us with a north- 
west wind, in the autumn, fly in a day, there is no clear account, but, 
coming over the .sea, their flight had been long or very speedy. 
For I have known them to light so weary on the coast, that many 
have been taken with dogs, and some knocked down wdth staves 
and stones. ”+ We are not much better informed on this subject 
now than we were two hundred years ago, when Sir Thomas Browne 
penned the above observations; the exhausted birds still arrive on 
the coast, and after a brief rest to recruit themselves, disperse inland, 
but whence they come, and by what route, the scraps of evidence 
we possess, only enable us to guess. Our subject is ^flight, not mi- 
gration, and I must only touch upon the latter so far as it serves to 
illustrate the immense power of enduring protracted flight, possessed 
even by some of the weakest of our land birds ; but that many of 
our little spring migrants can endure the fatigue of such a flight a.s 
they must make to reach our shores, is too wonderful to believe, 
were it not placed beyond all doubt that they do undertake such 
flights, from the the fact of their having been captured on board ships, 
far from any land. That the albatro.ss shoitld follow a ship for many 
days in succession, or that the Cape pigeon .should be known to 
have done the sjtme for a distance of 1500 miles, or that the same 
giant petrel (Procellaria gigantea) for three weeks, should hover about 
the vessel in which Mr. Gould was sailing,^; is sufticiently astonish- 
ing, even allowing them an occjisional rest on the surface of the 
water. But what shall we say to the great tit (Parus major), 920 
* Vol. 2, p. 292, second edition. 
t Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, tract v, vol. iv, p. 189, Wilkin’s edition, 
i “Ibis,” i860, p. 292. 
