GUILLEMOT (Fr. _guillemot_[1]), the name accepted by nearly all modern authors for a sea-bird, the _Colymbus troile_ of Linnaeus and the _Uria troile_ of Latham, which nowadays it seems seldom if ever to bear among those who, from their vocation, are most conversant with it, though, according to Willughby and Ray his translator, it was in their time so called "by those of Northumberland and Durham." Around the coasts of Britain it is variously known as the frowl, kiddaw or skiddaw, langy (cf. Ice. _Langvia_), lavy, marrock, murre, scout (cf. COOT), scuttock, strany, tinker or tinkershire and willock. In former days the guillemot yearly frequented the cliffs on many parts of the British coasts in countless multitudes, and this is still the case in the northern parts of the United Kingdom; but more to the southward nearly all its smaller settlements have been rendered utterly desolate by the wanton and cruel destruction of their tenants during the breeding season, and even the inhabitants of those which were more crowded had become so thinned that, but for the intervention of the Sea Birds Preservation Act (32 & 33 Vict. cap. 17), which provided under penalty for the safety of this and certain other species at the time of year when they were most exposed to danger, they would unquestionably by this time have been exterminated so far as England is concerned. Part of the guillemot's history is still little understood. We know that it arrives at its wonted breeding stations on its accustomed day in spring, that it remains there till, towards the end of the summer, its young are hatched and able, as they soon are, to encounter the perils of a seafaring life, when away go all, parents and progeny. After that time it commonly happens that a few examples are occasionally met with in bays and shallow waters. Tempestuous weather will drive ashore a large number in a state of utter destitution--many of them indeed are not unfrequently washed up dead--but what becomes of the bulk of the birds, not merely the comparatively few thousands that are natives of Britain, but the tens and hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, that are in summer denizens of more northern latitudes, no one can say. This mystery is not peculiar to the guillemot, but is shared by all the _Alcidae_ that inhabit the Atlantic Ocean. Examples stray every season across the Bay of Biscay, are found off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, enter the Mediterranean and reach Italian waters, or, keeping farther south, may even touch the Madeiras, Canaries or Azores; but these bear no proportion whatever to the mighty hosts of whom they are literally the "scouts," and whose position and movements they no more reveal than do the vedettes of a well-appointed army. The common guillemot of both sides of the Atlantic is replaced farther northward by a species with a stouter bill, the _U. arra_ or _U. bruennichi_ of ornithologists, and on the west coast of North America by the _U. californica_.