On Funk Island, a favorite breeding-place, the great auk was exterminated in 1840, and in Iceland in 1844.  Many natives ate this bird with relish, and being easily captured, either on land or sea, the commercialism of its day soon obliterated the species.  The last living specimen was seen in 1852, and the last dead one was picked up in Trinity Bay, Ireland, in 1853.  There are about 80 mounted and unmounted skins in existence, four skeletons, and quite a number of eggs.  An egg is worth about $1200 and a good mounted skin at least double that sum.

THE LABRADOR DUCK,—­Camptorhynchus labradoricus, (Gmel.).—­This handsome sea-duck, of a species related to the eider ducks of arctic waters, became totally extinct about 1875, before the scientific world even knew that its existence was threatened.  With this species, the exact and final cause of its extinction is to this day unknown.  It is not at all probable, however, that its unfortunate blotting out from our bird fauna was due to natural causes, and when the truth becomes known, it is very probable that the hand of man will be revealed.

The Labrador duck bred in Labrador, and once frequented our Atlantic coast as far south as Chesapeake Bay; but it is said that it never was very numerous, at least during the twenty-five years preceding its disappearance.  About thirty-five skins and mounted museum specimens are all that remain to prove its former existence, and I think there is not even one skeleton.

THE PALLAS CORMORANT,—­Carbo perspicillatus, (Pallas).—­In 1741, when the Russian explorer, Commander Bering, discovered the Bering or Commander Islands, in the far-north Pacific, and landed upon them, he also discovered this striking bird species.  Its plumage both above and below was a dark metallic green, with blue iridescence on the neck and purple on the shoulders.  A pale ring of naked skin around each eye suggested the Latin specific name of this bird.  The Pallas cormorant became totally extinct, through causes not positively known, about 1852.

THE PASSENGER PIGEON,—­Ectopistes migratoria, (Linn.).—­We place this bird in the totally-extinct class, not only because it is extinct in a wild state, but only one solitary individual, a twenty-year-old female in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens, now remains alive.  One living specimen and a few skins, skeletons and stuffed specimens are all that remain to show for the uncountable millions of pigeons that swarmed over the United States, only yesterday as it were!

There is no doubt about where those millions have gone.  They went down and out by systematic, wholesale slaughter for the market and the pot, before the shotguns, clubs and nets of the earliest American pot-hunters.  Wherever they nested they were slaughtered.

It is a long and shameful story, but the grisly skeleton of its Michigan chapter can be set forth in a few words.  In 1869, from the town of Hartford, Mich., three car loads of dead pigeons were shipped to market each day for forty days, making a total of 11,880,000 birds.  It is recorded that another Michigan town marketed 15,840,000 in two years.  (See Mr. W.B.  Mershon’s book, “The Passenger Pigeon.”)