Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PENGUINS AND THEIR WAYS UNCROWNED KINGS AND EMPERORS INNOCENT ARMIES SURF MISSED IN A BASIN DARWIN AND THE PENGUIN HARANGUING THE PENGUINNERY. A1ONGST the strangest and, as Buffon calls them, the most unbirdlike-looking of all birds, are the penguins?an aquatic family, numbering many species, whose headquarters are the wide waters of the southern seas, as far as to the remotest parts that have yet been explored. Wherever, indeed, the land that lies around the southern pole has a coastline, it is probable that penguins lay their eggs and rear their young; and the best hope for their continuing to do so is that some parts of this area may be too remote, or have too rigorous a climate to admit of its being often visited by mankind. Wherever sailors go, these poor birds, besides being plundered of their eggs, are destroyed in thousands, so that if every one of their breeding-haunts were to be visited each year, they would before long become extinct. On some islands, indeed, they are protected, but a modicum of protection accorded to a bird is not of much avail as against a vast amount of slaughter. Independently of what it may suffer in unequal warfare with the greed and brutality of man, every species bas to hold its own in thegeneral struggle for life, and when reduced to very small numbers, it may be unable to do so. The Falkland Islands, which lie far down off the western coast of South America, were once amongst the most popular breeding- resorts for various species of penguins, but now, says Professor Newton, owing doubtless to the ravages of man, whose advent is always accompanied by massacre and devastation on an enormous scale, it does not nearly approach to what it is in other places?the habit of the helpless birds, when breeding, to congregate b...