The frigate birds and boobies weigh about two and a half pounds. The former have not webbed feet like the boobies and therefore they cannot catch fish as easily for they only swoop down and dip them out of the water; but the other dives right in and sometimes out of sight for several feet underneath and swims with his webbed feet. Frigate birds steal the other’s fish. Both birds have tremendously long wings and sail in the sky with a long, long spread. The male frigate has a queer pouch on his throat. He is dark brownish in body, with a few greeny feathers on the top of his neck and then this very strange balloon which is so distended he can rest his head upon it and go to sleep. He can puff it up or have it empty. The male sits on the nest in the mornings mostly while his mate goes out to sea fishing. She is dark brown with a white breast. Of course you can see these bright red pouches a long way off and they look like so many toy balloons in among the bushes. All these birds, the boobies and frigates, build rather foolish looking nests right on the bushes about two feet from the ground so of course one can go right up to them and see the eggs or young chicks. The little doves and the mocking birds have their nests on the ground often under a jutting out rock. The doves have bright red feet, soft tan brown bodies and eyes as blue as forget-me-not flowers. On Tower we saw amblyrhinchus, or the marine lizard. I really learned to pronounce that word, although I can’t spell it yet. A lot of these scientific names are awfully long and hard. It is black, about a foot long or maybe fifteen inches, and swims in around the edges of the rocks. All the specimens brought to the ship had seaweed in their stomachs which they must have been way out to sea to get. Some of the crew had seen goats at Seymour. They had been left there a hundred years ago by a sea captain who had had some on his boat for fresh milk; he took them ashore to give them a chance to eat grass. Each day he took fresh water to them. Then one day they did not come back for the water, and he guessed they had found some on the island and sailed off leaving them there. But there are no goats here, nor the land lizards which we had seen at Seymour. The land is absolutely all lava rock and cactus and stiff prickly bushes which makes climbing around very difficult. I made a fine collection of shells that I found on the beach. Several times I went ashore in the evening with the crew, and one night two of the men had an awful fight. Just the few of us were on this desert beach alone, and it reminded me of a story that Darwin told in his Cruise of the Beagle nearly a hundred years ago. He went to a little lake on one island and saw there the skull of a captain who had been murdered by his crew there many years before.