relates are that they had a cry like a gosling (“il a un cry comme l’oison”), and that they laid a single white egg (“gros comme un pain d’un sol”) on a mass of grass in the forests. He calls them “oiseaux de Nazaret,” perhaps, as a marginal note informs us, from an island of that name which was then supposed to lie more to the northward, but is now known to have no existence.
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| Fig. 1.—Skeleton of a Dodo, Didus ineptus, Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, and cast of a Head in Oxford. |
In the catalogue of Tradescant’s Collection of Rarities, preserved at South Lambeth, published in 1656, we have entered among the “Whole Birds,” a “Dodar from the island Mauritius; it is not able to flie being so big.” This specimen may well have been the skin of the bird seen by Lestrange some eighteen years before, but anyhow we are able to trace the specimen through Willughby, Edward Llwyd and Thomas Hyde, till it passed in or before 1684 to the Ashmolean collection at Oxford. In 1755 it was ordered to be destroyed, but, in accordance with the original orders of Ashmole, its head and right foot were preserved, and still ornament the museum of that university. In the second edition of a Catalogue of many Natural Rarities, &c., “to be seen at the place formerly called the Music House, near the West End of St Paul’s Church,” collected by one Hubert alias Forbes, and published in 1665, mention is made of a “legge of a Dodo, a great heavy bird that cannot fly; it is a Bird of the Mauricius Island.” This is supposed to have subsequently passed into the possession of the Royal Society. At all events such a specimen is included in Grew’s list of their treasures which was published in 1681. This was afterwards transferred to the British Museum. It is a left foot, without the integuments, but it differs sufficiently in size from the Oxford specimen to forbid its having been part of the same individual. In 1666 Olearius brought out the Gottorffische Kunst Kammer, wherein he describes the head of a Walghvögel which some sixty years later was removed to the museum at Copenhagen, and is now preserved there, having been the means of first leading zoologists, under the guidance of Prof. J. Th. Reinhardt, to recognize the true affinities of the bird.
We have passed over all but the principal narratives of voyagers or other notices of the bird. A compendious bibliography, up to the year 1848, will be found in Strickland’s classical work,[1] and the list was continued by Von Frauenfeld[2] for twenty years later. The last evidence we have of the dodo’s existence is furnished by a journal kept by Benj. Harry, and now in the British Museum (MSS. Addit. 3668. II. D). This shows its survival till 1681, but the writer’s sole remark upon it is that its “fflesh is very hard.” The successive occupation of the island by different masters seems to have destroyed every tradition relating to the bird, and doubts began to arise whether such a creature had ever existed. Dr Henry Duncan, Scottish minister and journalist, in 1828, showed how ill-founded these doubts were, and some ten years later William John Broderip with much diligence collected all the available evidence into an admirable essay, which in its turn was succeeded by Strickland’s monograph just mentioned. But in the meanwhile little was done towards obtaining any material advance in our knowledge, Prof. Reinhardt’s determination of its affinity to the pigeons (Columbae) excepted; and it was hardly until George Clark’s discovery in 1865 of a large number of dodos’ remains in the mud of a pool (the Mare aux Songes) that zoologists generally were prepared to accept that affinity without question. The examination of bone after bone by Sir R. Owen (Trans. Zool. Soc. vi. p. 49) confirmed the judgment of the Danish naturalist.
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| Fig. 2.—The Solitaire of Rodriguez (Pezophaps solitarius). From Leguat’s figure. |
In 1889 Th. Sauzier, acting for the government of Mauritius, sent a great number of bones from the same swamp to Sir Edward Newton.[3] From these the first correctly restored and properly mounted skeleton was prepared and sent to Paris, to be forwarded to the museum of Mauritius. Good specimens are in the British Museum, at Paris and at Cambridge, England.
The huge blackish bill of the dodo terminated in a large, horny hook; the cheeks were partly bare, the stout, short legs yellow. The plumage was dark ash-coloured, with whitish breast and tail, yellowish white wings (incapable of flight). The short tail formed a curly tuft.
The dodo is said to have inhabited forests and to have laid one large white egg on a mass of grass. Besides man, hogs and other imported animals seem to have exterminated it. But the dodo is not the only member of its family that has vanished. The little island which has successively borne the name of Mascaregnas, England’s Forest, Bourbon and Réunion, and lies to the southward of Mauritius, had also an allied bird, now dead and gone. Of this not a relic has been handled by any naturalist. The latest description of it, by Du Bois in 1674, is very meagre, while Bontekoe (1646) gave a figure, apparently intended to represent it. It was originally called the “solitaire,” but this name was also applied to Pezophaps solitarius of Rodriguez by the Huguenot exile Leguat, who described and figured it about 1691.
The solitaire, Didus solitarius of Gmelin, referred by Strickland to a district genus Pezophaps, is supposed to have lingered in the
