CHAPTER XIII. 
THE GREAT AUK 
(A lea impennis ). 
“ The heavy penguin, neither fish nor fowl, 
With scaly feathers and with finny wings, 
Plump’d stone-like from the rock into the gulf, 
Rebounding upward swift as from a sling.” 
Montgomery. 
Here we have standing before us, on the very verge of 
extinction, a most singularly-formed inhabitant of the 
northern portion of our globe. It looks like the picture 
of a being taken from some past creation, so antediluvian 
is it in form and fashion. Far away to the north, where 
bleak, barren lands rise up as though disputing the 
advance of man, where the sea adds new and unconquer¬ 
able dangers to those which usually fall to the lot of 
the sailor, where the fierce cold heaps up the crystal 
waves into mountains, where the billows are at continual 
war with the rocky islets;—there is its present home, if, 
indeed, this creature—lost sight of for years, in spite of 
all search—still has a home; if inexorable Fate has not 
struck its name off the roll of living beings. 
The Great Auk possesses but few relatives amongst 
the northern rock-fowl, though it is represented in the 
Antarctic Ocean by the Penguin. The arctic bird, how¬ 
ever, differs from that of the southern polar regions. 
