PREFACE, 
Just twenty years ago, my dear brother was preparing, with 
all the eagerness of a boy naturalist, to be the companion of 
my second visit to Shetland, where the summer was to be 
spent as we loved best to spend it ; nor is it altogether without 
a strange sort of fitness that he now hands me the result of 
his work thus begun, as he passes out of our sight for a while. 
Yet the task of giving it to the world is far from easy to one 
who has for so many years been out of the track of natural 
science, though loving no earthly thing so well. I can claim 
but a single merit for my share in the book, — that of accuracy ; 
for the rest, allowance must be generously made for short- 
comings almost inseparable from work thrown unexpectedly 
upon a parish priest, only able to give to it the hours which 
could be spared, and ill spared, from occupations of a wholly 
different kind. 
The manuscript substantially reproduced in the following 
pages was left by its Author in an incomplete state, both as to 
extent and as to general readiness for the press. Each page, 
however, shows evidence of extreme care in the compilation, 
there being almost no single statement in the book for which 
authority cannot be adduced, with full circumstances of time 
and place, from one or other of the many annual volumes of 
the daily ornithological register. The Author’s personal work 
came to an abrupt ending in the middle of the Alcadcc; 
but it must not be supposed that the rest of the book is 
merely on authority so slender as mine. The reader may 
