SUMMER HOMES OF THE SEA-BIRDS. 85 
meets with are quite new. To him the eider-duck mainly calls 
up a light and truly delightful coverlet for his bed in very cold 
weather, but here his boat steams through flocks of these 
ducks, as he goes northwards ; or in the Porsanger Fjord 
he is shown an island that belongs to the chief magistrate of 
Finmark, and is strictly preserved for the nesting places of 
these ducks, whose down forms the most valuable produce of 
the island. 
The Lusitania steamed far north to the polar ice, along which 
the vessel edged for many miles, and the fortunate voyagers on 
board everywhere found birds of many kinds, with whales and 
shoals of porpoises, all around them. 
An interesting question arises as to what, mainly, these 
enormous hosts of birds, old and young, feed upon. At stated 
times the parents leave the Bird-rocks, often in regular lines, and 
they return with crops full to repletion of succulent food. This 
they obtain in unstinted quantity partly from the ova of fish, but 
chiefly from enormous masses of crustaceans that drift to and 
fro all over the polar sea. The largest of all living creatures, 
the huge blue whale {Balcenoptem Sihhaldii), finds ample nutriment 
in these prodigious swarms of crustaceans, of which the mighty 
giant’s capacious stomach must, one would think, contain many 
boat-loads at a time. By and by the breeding birds and their 
young all leave the cliff's bare and take to the sea, and there they 
may be seen in entire clouds engaged in fishing. In winter the 
Bird-rocks are wholly deserted till March comes round, and then 
the preparation for breeding begins again, and the old haunts 
are once more seized upon. 
On Svasrholtklubben, as on other such cliffs, a very large 
number of eggs are taken for eating, but the Norwegians have 
not yet had recourse to ropes to secure these eggs, as is done in 
the Faroe Islands and in some parts of Scotland. They obtain 
as many as they want without having recourse to any such 
devices as this. 
The more we get to know of these northern regions the more 
shall we have reason to be filled with wonder at the many and 
varied things that they disclose to us. The flora of the land is 
well worthy of study. Sometimes we may see a whole island 
covered, in June, with the white flowers of the cloudberry, and 
these produce in autumn luxuriant branches of red berries that 
are much sought after. And at another time we hear of shores 
and islands lying farther north than Scandinavia where pro- 
digious masses have been discovered of bones and tusks of the 
mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, thus forming, in the 
Arctic Ocean, Treasure-islands richer than any that poets have 
feigned amid the waters of the Pacific. An enormous tusk 
therefrom, which, though incomplete, is some eight feet long, 
is exhibited, under a table, in the Geological Museum. These are 
the remains of hosts of huge animals that seem to have been 
overwhelmed or destroyed in some one of those ice-ages, of 
