PENGUINS DESCRIBED.

and the under white.

45

Thus, with their heads erect,

and their fin-like wings hanging down as half arms, they look like so many children with white aprons. Hence they are not improperly said "to unite in themselves the qualities of men, fowls, and fishes. Like men, they are upright; like fowls, they are feathered; and, like fish, they have fin-like instruments that beat the water before, and serve for all the purposes of swimming rather than flying. They are also covered more warmly all over the body with feathers than any other bird, so that the sea seems entirely their element."

These penguin islands lie between 51 and 53 degrees S. lat. and 57 and 63 degrees W. long. They are at present claimed by the English, they having a government colony at Port Egmont, on an island seventy or eighty miles to the westward of Berkley's Sound, where American whaling ships frequently put in for supplies and vegetable antiscorbutics. Eighty years ago there was a French settlement twenty miles up the Berkley Sound, but it was long since abandoned by them, and is now occupied by another colony of English. A troop of wild horses, seen by us above the cliffs while we were standing into the Sound, must have originated from that colony, the only natural quadrupeds being wolves and foxes. Seals and sea-elephants are abundant in the waters. The island on which we landed is expressively called by the Spaniards Isla de la Solidad, or the Island of Solitude. The weather there is said to be uniformly cold and stormy, and all the islands, indeed, have been sometimes denominated Foul Weather Group. They produce no trees, and only a dwarfish shrubbery, but there are

vast beds of peat, that supply an excellent fuel. Myrtles and roses bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche. One may believe it who has seen the verdure and flowers of the Falklands blooming unchilled, when the piercing wind and cold would make him think it was the bleak November rather than the flowering June of the South. One hundred and fifty years hence, when the Valley of the Mississippi, at the present rate of increase, shall support a thousand millions, and the world at large shall be more densely populated, Isla de la Solidad may be made to maintain its thousands. May the domestic virtues and plants of holiness then be found blooming there, as they long have in the more rigorous Iceland of the North!

-A month from the Falkland Islands, and this is the first day of smooth sea and warm sun we have enjoyed for all that time. Long and cold have been the days we have spent battling with the rough winds and mountainous seas of Cape Horn. Between southwest and southeast gales on the one side of the Cape, and northwest on the other, our course has been zigzag and slow. Happily we have escaped injury, except the loss of a jib-boom, and our ship remains tight through all the straining. We congratulate ourselves in having weathered the Cape in less time than it often takes, though it be more than is sometimes the fortune of the Cape Horn navigator. One of our seamen has twice before tried the passage, but without success. And after fifty-four days of most fatiguing warfare with contrary winds, the brig opened at the bow, and they were compelled to put about and run for Rio Janeiro, where the spoiled vessel and cargo