(Footnote.  “Sometimes when we came suddenly upon them, or waked them out of their sleep (for they are a sluggish sleepy animal) they would raise up their heads, snort and snarl, and look as fierce as if they meant to devour us; but as we advanced upon them, they always ran away; so that they are downright bullies.”  Cook’s Voyages Volume 4 page 187.)

On this—­Peat Islet of the chart—­the tussock grass grows in great luxuriance, and to a stranger presents a most singular appearance.  Its clusters of stems—­frequently upwards of a hundred or more in a bunch—­are raised from the ground upon a densely matted mass of old and decayed roots, two or three feet high, from the summit of which the leaves, frequently six feet in length, arch gracefully outwards.  The tussock grass has been likened to a palm on a small scale, but altogether it reminded me more of the Xanthorrhoea, or grass-tree of Australia.  We saw many seals swimming about among the kelp, and on the shore found the carcases of several which had lately been killed with clubs, each of the skulls having been fractured by a blow at the root of the nose.  They were of the kind known here as the hair-seal, the skin of which is of little value.  It is still very abundant; but the fur-seal, from the indiscriminate slaughter of old and young for many years back has become scarce, and is now confined to a few favourite localities—­rookeries as they are called, a name also applied at the Falklands to any great breeding place of penguins or other seafowl.  A few days ago a party of five sealers returned to the settlement after a short absence, with the skins of no less than 120 fur-seals, worth, I was told, twenty-five shillings each.

Here I found two pairs of the sheathbill (Chionis alba) a bird whose place in the system has puzzled ornithologists.  It has been variously considered as being one of the galinaceous birds, the pigeons, the waders, and even as belonging to the web-footed order.  Its habits are those of the oyster-catchers,* however different the form of the beak, which in the sheathbill is short, stout, and pointed, and enveloped at the base by a waxy-looking sheath.  Its feet are like those of a gallinaceous bird, yet one which I wounded took voluntarily to the water and swam off to a neighbouring point to rejoin its mate.  Cuvier, besides erroneously mentioning that it is a native of New Holland, states that it feeds on carrion; the stomachs of two which I examined contained seaweed, limpets, and small quartz pebbles.  The people here call it the rock-dove, and from its snow-white plumage it forms a conspicuous object along the shores.

(Footnote.  When the above was written I had not seen the remarks on Chionis by M. Blainville, whose anatomical investigation assigns to it precisely the same position in the system—­or next the oyster-catchers—­which appeared to me to have been indicated by its habits.  Voyage de la Bonite Zoologie tome 1 page 107 plate (oiss.) 9.)