Amongst 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 has to hold its own in the general 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 by hundreds and thousands in what are called penguin rookeries, contributing to the ease with which their slaughter can be effected. Incapable of escape by flight, they are yet able to make enough resistance or retaliation (for they bite powerfully when they get the chance) to excite the wrath of their murderers, and this only brings upon them greater destruction, so that the interest of nearly all the numerous accounts of these rookeries is spoilt by the disgusting details of the brutal havoc perpetrated upon them.” It is to be hoped that the rising generation, by having stronger views upon these things than have hitherto been held by the great majority of people, will gradually bring them to an end. Otherwise books like this will become more and more difficult to write—for there can be no romance of animal life when animal life has disappeared, and the rapidity with which it is disappearing all over the world is dreadful to think of.