Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/287

281 JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO N. W. AMERICA. 281 kind of bird I wanted, & I believe had we stayed a few weeks longer I might have acquired a specimen of almost every animal in the river. 10 November, 1825. Since leaving the Columbia on the 25 October we have been favoured with an uninterrupted course of favourable weather, which in 14 days has car- ried us to the Northern tropic. Previous to entering the latitude of 30 N. we were attended by many individuals of the Diomedia fuliginosa, a bird formerly supposed to be peculiar to the Southern hemisphere. It is remarkable that the albatross, which is so common in the N. Pacific of the American coast, should never make jts appearance in the N. Atlantic Ocean. To-day we saw the little islands of Socora & San Berto; the last named island presents the appearance of a rugged, inaccessible rock, & affords a secure retreat to the man-of- war bird & the boobies. It is curious that notwithstanding the apparent barren- ness of the rocks that a very great quantity of necessarily comminuted driftwood continued to float past us while in their vicinity. This forenoon we were so fortunate as to shoot a man-of-war bird & the Captain was so good as to send the boat to pick it up ; & I had the pleasure of adding this rare bird to my collection. Convinced that preserving the skin of a bird was doing very little towards a complete knowledge of ornithology, I made as complete a dissection as I could of the Tachypetes. Tongue small, oesophagus very wide, & furnished with many longitudinal plicas, which terminate abruptly at the entrance of the first stomach. The coats of this stomach are very thick, & at first sight one might imagine that it was very mus- cular. The muscular coat, however, does not occupy above one third of the thickness of the stomach. Be- tween the muscular & villous coats there is a glandular apparatus, which [contains] more than a half of the sub-