There is a total want of quills in their wings, which are incapable of flexure, though they move freely at the shoulder-joint, and some at least of the species occasionally make use of them for progressing on land. In the water they are most efficient paddles. The plumage, which clothes the whole body, generally consists of small scale-like feathers, many of them consisting only of a simple shaft without the development of barbs; but several of the species have the head decorated with long cirrhous tufts, and in some the tail-quills, which are very numerous, are also long.[1] In standing these birds preserve an upright position, sometimes resting on the “tarsus”[2] alone, but in walking or running this is kept nearly vertical, and their weight is supported by the toes alone.
The most northerly limit of the penguins’ range in the Atlantic is Tristan d’Acunha, and in the Indian Ocean Amsterdam Island, but they also occur off the Cape of Good Hope and along the coast of Australia, as well as on the south and east of New Zealand, while in the Pacific one species at least extends along the west coast of South America and to the Galapagos, but north of the equator none are found. In the breeding season they resort to the most desolate lands in higher southern latitudes, and indeed have been met with as far to the southward as navigators have penetrated. Possibly the Falkland Islands are richest in species, though, as individuals, they are not nearly so numerous there as in many other places. The food of penguins consists of crustaceans, cephalopods and other molluscs, varied by fish and vegetable matter. The birds form immense breeding colonies, known as “rookeries.” The nest of grass, leaves, or where vegetation is scanty of stones or rubbish, is placed on the ground or in holes. Two chalky white or greenish eggs are laid. The young penguins, clad in thick down, are born blind and are fed by the parents for an unusually long time before taking to the water. Penguins bite savagely when molested, but are easily trained and display considerable intelligence.
King-Penguin (Aptenodytes pennanti).
The Spheniscidae have been divided into at least eight genera, but three, or at most four, seem to be all that are needed, and three can be well distinguished, as pointed out by E. Coues in Proc. Acad. of Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia, 1872 (pp. 170–212), by anatomical as well as by external characters. They are (1) Aptenodytes, easily recognized by its long and thin bill, slightly decurved, from which Pygoscelis, as M. Watson has shown, is hardly distinguishable, (2) Eudyptes, in which the bill is much shorter and rather broad, and (3) Spheniscus, in which the shortish bill is compressed and the maxilla ends in a conspicuous hook. Aptenodytes contains the largest species, among them those known as the “Emperor” and “King” penguins A. patagonica and A. longirostris. Three others belong also to this genus, if Pygoscelis be not recognized, but they seem not to require any particular remark. Eudyptes, containing the crested penguins, known to sailors as “Rock-hoppers” or “Macaronis,” would appear to have five species, and Spheniscus four, among which S. mendiculus, which occurs in the Galapagos, and therefore has the most northerly range of the whole group, alone needs notice here. (A. N.)
The generic and specific distribution of the penguins is the subject of an excellent essay by Alphonse Milne-Edwards in the Annales des sciences naturelles for 1880 (vol. ix. art. 9, pp. 23–81); see also the Records of the Antarctic Expedition, 1901–1904.
PENHALLOW, SAMUEL (1665–1726), American colonist
and historian, was born at St Mabon, Cornwall, England,
on the 2nd of July 1665. From 1683 to 1686 he attended a
school at Newington Green (near London) conducted by the
Rev. Charles Morton (1627–1698), a dissenting clergyman,
with whom he emigrated to Massachusetts in 1686. He was
commissioned by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
in New England to study the Indian languages and to preach
to the Indians; but he was soon diverted from this work.
Removing to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he there married a
daughter of John Cutt (1625–1681), president of the province
of New Hampshire in 1679–1680, a successful merchant and
mill-owner, and thus came into possession of considerable
property (including much of the present site of Portsmouth).
In 1700 he was speaker of the Assembly and in 1702 became a
member of the Provincial Council, but was suspended by
Lieut.-Governor George Vaughan (1676–1724). Penhallow,
however, was sustained by Governor Samuel Shute (1662–1742),
and Vaughan was removed from office in 1716. In 1714
Penhallow was appointed a justice of the superior court of
judicature, and from 1717 until his death was chief justice of that
court; and he also served as treasurer of the province in
1699–1726, and as secretary of the province in 1714–1726. He died at
Portsmouth on the 2nd of December 1726. He wrote a valuable
History of the Wars of New England with the Eastern Indians,
or a Narrative of their Continued Perfidy and Cruelty (1726;
reprinted in the Collections of the New Hampshire Historical
Society, vol. i., 1824, and again at Cincinnati in 1859), which
covers the period from 1703 to 1726, and is a standard contemporary
authority.
PENINGTON, SIR ISAAC (c. 1587–1661), lord mayor of London, eldest son of Robert Penington, a London fishmonger, was born probably in 1587. His father besides his London business had landed estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, which Isaac inherited in addition to a property in Buckinghamshire which he himself purchased. In 1638 Isaac became an alderman and high sheriff of London. In 1640 he was elected to the House of Commons as member for the city of London, and immediately took a prominent place among the Puritan party. In 1642 he was elected lord mayor of London, but retained his seat in parliament by special leave of the Commons, and he was elected lord mayor for a second term in the following year, continuing while in office to raise large sums of money for the opposition to the Court party. From 1642 to 1645 he was lieutenant of the Tower, in which capacity he was present at the execution of Laud, but, though one of the commissioners for the trial of Charles I., he did not sign the death warrant. After the king’s death Penington served on Cromwell’s council of state, and on several committees of government. His services were rewarded by considerable grants of land, and a
- ↑ The pterylographical characters of the penguins are well described by A. Hyatt (Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. History, 1871). A. D. Bartlett has observed (Proc. Zool. Soc., 1879, pp. 6–9) that, instead of moulting in the way that birds ordinarily do, penguins, at least in passing from the immature to the adult dress, cast off the short scale like feathers from their wings in a manner that he compares to “the shedding of the skin in a serpent.”
- ↑ The three metatarsals in the penguins are not, as in other birds, united for the whole of their length, but only at the extremities, thus preserving a portion of their originally distinct existence, a fact probably attributable to arrest of development, since the researches of C. Gegenbaur show that the embryos of all birds, so far as is known, possess these bones in an independent condition.
