become its victims. Sticks and stones and pieces of iron are
digested by the ostrich. The secretary bird (the Falco Serpent-
arius) will take into his stomach whole living snakes of the
most venomous kind, toads, and scorpions, without suffering
from such an assemblage the least inconvenience. That such is
the fact, with regard to the food of this bird, I can speak with
confidence. I have seen their young in the nest surrounded with
wounded but living snakes : and the following circumstance
puts the matter beyond all doubt.—An English gentleman who
held an official situation at the Cape of Good Hope, being out
on a shooting party, killed one of these birds, which he carried
home w ith ' the intention of having an accurate drawing
made from it. He threw it on the floor of the balcony before
the house, where,; after it had remained some time and been
examined and tossed about, one of the company observed
the head of a large snake pushing open the bill, out of which
it speedily crawled, in perfect vigour, and free from any in-
iurv. On the supposition that others might still be in the
stomach, the bird was suspended by the legs, and presently
a second snake made its appearance, as large and as lively
as the first. The bird was afterwards opened, when the stomach
was found to contain several dead snakes, with a half
dio-ested mass of lizards and scorpions, scolopendras, centipedes,
and beetles.
Except on the coast of Spitsbergen, I '■never saw so vast an
assemblage of whales, grampusses, porpoises, sea-lions, and
seals, as were constantly either playing their, gambols, or
fighting and devouring each other, between the ships' anchorage
and the entrance of the crater. A fish, apparently
a species, of..delphinw or porpoise, probably that which is
usually called the Thrasher, was observed to attack the
whale with great violence, whenever the latter ventured, to
heave his huge back out of the surface of the sea, lashing it
with its tail and fins, the strokes of which the great monster
seemed to have no means of repelling but by rolling round in
the water. It was dangerous even for the hoats to row
among these large animals, which i t wouhi seem were
still more numerous on the fifst discovery o f the island, as in
the paper above alluded to it is observed “ That the people
5 of Van Vlaming, ship found the sea so full of seals and sea-
« lions, that they were obliged to kill them to get a passage
1 through, when they steered for the shore; there was also
« an astonishing number of fish.” Not only the sea but the
whole coast, in the mornings and evenings, swarmed with
seals and sea-lions.
The number of birds was likewise astonishing, and the two
causeways were strewed with their eggs. During our short
stay on shore we obtained the following birds:
Diomedea Demersa,
-----------------------Exulans,
Aptenodyta Chrysocome,
procellaria Equinoctialis,
— Puffinus,
-- Grisea,
Ì
Pelagica,
The 'White and the Brown Albatross.
Crested Penguin.
Black Petrel.
Puffin.
Grey Petrel.
Stormy Petrel.