Contributions to the Natural History of the Com - Mander Islands

About forty years ago the Great Auk (Plautus impennis) of the Northern Atlantic became exterminated. -A vigorous search has been made for it and its remains; fabulous sums have been paid for skins and eggs; and monographers, among whom some of the most prominent ornithologists, have collected together the most minute facts bearing upon its history, and discussed in extreme detail the number of specimens extant as well as their individual history, so that the latest account of this remarkable bird fills a quarto volume of quite respect, able dimensions. There are now on record about eighty mounted specimens, or skins, seventy eggs, and countless bones as being preserved in the various museums of the Old and the New World. Within the same period another large water bird has become extinct in the North Pacific, without having as yet attracted the attention of the monographers. It is so rare in collections that only four specimens are known to exist in museums, while nobody is the proud possessor of its eggs, and no bones had been found or preserved until I was so fortunate some years ago as to rescue a few of them. Yet, this bird was the largest and handsomest of its tribe. And so little has been known of it that there is not yet printed a detailed and good description of it. The bird which has fared so badly is Pallas's Cormorant, or the Spectacled Cormorant, Phalacrocorax perspicillatus Pall. I have recorded elsewhere (Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., vi, 1883, p. 65, and