Science might use her influence to check the dance of death, instead of making it caper more wildly, but there is something in a museum which brings down the high to the level of the low, and makes the learned biologist and the banging idiot the best of good friends and confederates. That museum must be filled, and when it is full the next thing to do is to fill it again; so the cry is ever for specimens, ever "Kill!" That the creature wanted is rare makes it all the more wanted, and a moment's pause in getting it may lead to another museum getting it first: perhaps--coveted honour!--only just before it becomes extinct. For extinction adds a charm to a specimen when once your own museum has obtained it: the rarer it becomes after that, the more the curators chuckle, and with its ceasing for ever rivals are left out in the cold. So science leagues itself with death, and the museums roar, one against another, "Kill!"
A young shag, now, to take these unpleasant reflections out of my mind, is being fed by one of the parents on a great slab of rock, which has no nest upon it that I can see. Now this young bird is nearly, if not quite, as large as the grown one, and only to be distinguished from it by its unadorned brown plumage and the paleness of the skin where naked. There is no doubt at all, I think, that it must long have been swimming, since I have seen smaller and younger-looking birds doing so. The young shag, therefore, must be fed for some time after leaving the nest, and taking to the sea.
At last I have been able to extract a young puffin from an all-turf hole, which, by reason of its straightness, shortness and narrowness, seems to have been made by the parent birds themselves, not merely found and appropriated by them. _Comme il est drôle, ce petit!_--though not quite so comic as he will be by and by. Here we have a very salient example of the difference exhibited between the young and mature animal, in regard to some specially developed part or organ, since the beak of this baby is not only without the smallest trace of the colours which seem painted on that of its parents, but, to the eye at least, shows hardly anything of the mature shape, though measurement brings it out more clearly. It is of a uniform black, and hardly looks more than an ordinary beak when one thinks of the grown puffin, or rather when one looks at any of the hundreds standing all about. Though of a good size--some three-quarters grown perhaps--there are no true feathers on the body, at present--all fluffy, black above and whitish underneath. That this black, fluffy, colourless thing should ever become a puffin at all, seems wonderful.
