164 
PROCELLARIA PELAGICA. 
prefer the neighbourhood of the coast for the purpose 
of breeding-. They retire southward early in autumn. 
GENUS LXIV.— PROCELLARIA, Linnjeus. 
253. PRO CELL A EI A PELAGICA , LINNAEUS, 
STORMY PETREL. 
WILSON, PLATE LX. FIG. VI. EDINBURGH COLLEGE MUSEUM. 
There are few persons who have crossed the Atlantic, 
or traversed much of the ocean, who have not observed 
these solitary wanderers of the deep, skimming along 
the surface of the wild and wasteful ocean, flitting past 
the vessel like swallows, or following in her wake, 
gleaning their scanty pittance of food from the rough 
and whirling surges. Habited in mourning, and making 
their appearance generally in greater numbers previous 
to or during a storm, they have long been fearfully 
regarded by the ignorant and superstitious, not only 
as the foreboding messengers of tempests and dangers 
to the hapless mariner, but as wicked agents, connected, 
somehow or other, in creating them. “ Nobody,” say 
they, “ can tell any thing of where they come from, 
or how they breed, though, as sailors sometimes say, 
it is supposed that they hatch their eggs under their 
wings as they sit on the water.” This mysterious un- 
certainty of their origin, and the circumstances above 
recited, have doubtless given rise to the opinion so 
prevalent among this class of men, that they are in 
some way or other connected with that personage who 
has been styled the Prince of the Powder of the Air. 
In every country where they are know n, their names 
have borne some affinity to this belief. They have 
been called witches,* stormy petrels, the devil’s birds. 
Mother Carey’s chickens, f probably from some cele- 
brated ideal hag of that name ; and their unexpected 
* Arctic Zoology , p. 464. 
■f This name seems to have been originally given them by Captain 
Carteret’s sailors, who met with these birds on the coast of Chili. 
See Hawkesworth’s Voyages , vol. i, p. 203. 
