66 mal productions at considerable length, makes no mention whatever of the bird in question. He adds "L'isle était autrefois toute remplie d'oyes et de canards sauvages; de poules d'eau, de gelinottes, de tortues de mer et de terre, mais tout cela est devenue fort rare. And, while referring to the hogs of the China kind," he states that these beasts do a great deal of damage, by devouring all the young animals they can catch. It is thus sufficiently evident that civilization was making aggressive inroads on the natural state of the Mauritius even in 1693. The Dutch evacuated the island in 1712, and were succeeded by the French, who colonised it under the name of Isle de France; and this change in the population no doubt accounts for the almost entire absence of any traditionary knowledge of this remarkable bird among the later in habitants. Baron Grant lived in the Mauritius for twenty years from 1740; and his son, who compiled his papers into a history of the island, states that no trace of such a bird was to be found at that time. In the Observations sur la Physique for the year 1778, there is a negative notice, by M. Morel, of the Dodo and its kindred. "Ces oiseaux, si bien décrits dans le tome 2 de l'Histoire des Oiseaux de M. le Comte de Buffon, n'ont jamais été vus aux Isles de France, &c., depuis plus de 60 ans que ces parages sont habités et visités par des colonies Françoises. Les plus anciens habitans assurent tous que ces oiseaux monstreaux leur ont toujours été inconnus." M. Bory St, Vincent, who visited the Mauritius and Bourbon in 1801, and has given us an account of the physical features of those islands in his "Voyage," assures us (vol. ii. p. 306) that he instituted all possible inquiries regarding the Dodo (or Dronte) and its kindred, without being able to pick up the slightest information on the subject; and although he advertised une grande recompense à qui pourrait lui donner la moindre indice de l'ancienne existence de cet oiseau, un silence universel a prouvé que le souvenir même du Dronte était perdu parmi les créoles." De Blainville informs us (Nouv. Ann. Mus. iv. 31) that the subject was discussed at a public dinner at the Mauritius in 1816, where were present several persons from seventy to ninety years of age, none of whom had any knowledge of any Dodo, either from recollection or tradition. Finally Mr. J. V. Thompson, who resided for some years in Mauritius prior to 1816, states (Mag. of Nat. Hist.., ii. 443) that no traces could then be found of the Dodo than of the truth of the tale of Paul and Virginia. more But the historical evidence already adduced, as to the former existence of this bird, is confirmed in a very interesting manner by what may be called the pictorial proof. Besides the rude delineations given by the earlier voyagers, there are several old oilpaintings of the Dodo still extant, by skilful artists, who had no other object in view than to represent with accuracy the forms before them. These painting are five in number, whereof one is anonymous; three bear the name of Roland Savery, an eminent Dutch animal-painter of the early portion of the seventeenth century, and one is by John Savery, Roland's nephew. The first of these is the best known, and is that from which the figure of the Dodo, in all modern compilations of ornithology, has been copied. It once belonged to George Edwards, who, in his work on birds (vi. 294), tells us, that "the original picture was drawn in Holland, from the living bird, brought from St. Maurice's island in the East Indies, in the early times of the discovery of the Indies by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. It was the property of the late Sir H. Sloane to the time of his death, and afterwards becoming my property, I deposited it in the British Museum as a great curiosity. The above history of the picture I had from Sir H. Sloane, and the late Dr. Mortimer, secretary to the Royal Society." It is still preserved in the place to which Edwards had consigned it, and may be seen in the bird gallery, along with the actual foot already mentioned. Although without name or date, the similarity both of design and execution leads to the conclusion that it was by one or other of the Saverys. It may be seen engraved in the Penny Cyclopædia, in illustration of Mr. Broderip's article Dodo in that work. The second painting, one of Roland Savery's, is in the royal collection at the Hague, and may be regarded as a chef-d'œuvre. It represents Orpheus charming the creation, and we there behold the Dodo spell-bound with his other mute companions. All the ordinary creatures there shown are depicted with the greatest truthfulness; and why should the artist, delighting, as he seems to have done, in tracing the most delicate features of familiar nature, have marred the beautiful consistency of his design by introducing a feigned, or even an exaggerated representation? We may here adduce the invaluable evidence of Professor Owen. "While at the Hague, in the summer of 1838, I was much struck with the minuteness and accuracy with which the exotic species of animals had been painted by Savery and Breughel, in such subjects as Orpheus charming the Beasts, &c., in which scope was allowed for grouping together a great variety of animals. Understanding that the celebrated menagerie of Prince Maurice had afforded the living models to these artists, I sat down one day before Savery's Orpheus and the Beasts, to make a list of the species,which the picture sufficiently evinced that the artist had had the opportunity to study alive. Judge of my surprise and pleasure in detecting, in a dark corner of the picture (which is badly hung between two windows), the Dodo, beautifully finished, showing for example, though but three inches long, the auricular circle of feathers, the scutation of the tarsi, and the loose structure of the caudal plumes. In the number and proportions of the toes, and in general form, it accords with Edwards' oil-painting in the British Museum; and I conclude that the miniature must have been copied from the study of a living bird, which, it is most probable, formed part of the Mauritian menagerie. The bird is standing in profile with a lizard at its feet."Penny Cyclopædia, xxiii. p. 143. Mr. Strickland, in 1845, made a search through the Royal Gallery of Berlin, which was known to contain several of Savery's pictures. Among them, we are happy to say that he found one representing the Dodo, with numerous other animals, "in Paradise!" It was very conformable with the figure last mentioned; but what renders this, our third portrait, of peculiar interest, is, that it affords a date-the words "Roelandt Savery fe. 1626," being inscribed on one corner. As the artist was born in 1576, he must have been twenty-three years old when Van Neck's expedition returned to Holland; and as we are told by De Bry, in reference to the Mauritius, that "aliæ ibidem aves visæ sunt, quas walkvögel Batavi nominarunt, et unam secum in Hollandiam importarunt," it is quite possible that the portrait of this individual may have been taken at the time, and afterwards recopied, both by himself and his nephew, in their later pictures. Professor Owen leans to the belief that Prince Maurice's collection afforded the living prototype, Edwards's tradition, that the painting -an opinion so far strengthened by in the British Museum was drawn in Holland from a "living bird." Either view is preferable to Dr. Hamel's suggestion, that Savery's representation was taken from the Dodo exhibited in London, as that individual was seen alive by Sir Hamon Lestrange in 1638, and must therefore (by no means a likely occurrence) have lived, in the event supposed, at least twelve years in captivity. Very recently Dr. J. J. de Tchudi, the well-known Peruvian traveller, transmitted to Mr. Strickland an exact copy of another figure of the Dodo, which forms part of a picture in the imperial collection of the Belvedere at Vienna-by no means a safe location, in these tempestuous times, for the treasures of either art or nature. But we trust that Prince Windischgratz and the hanging committee will now see that all is right, and that General Bem has not been allowed to carry off this drawing of the Dodo in his carpet-bag. It is dated 1628. "There are two circumstances," says Mr. Strickland," which gave an especial interest to this painting First, the novelty of attitude in the Dodo, exhibiting an activity of character which corroborates the supposition that the artist had a living model before him, and contrasting strongly with the aspect of passive secondly, the Dodo is represented as stolidity in the other pictures. And, watching, apparently with hungry looks, the merry wrigglings of an eel in the water! Are we hence to infer that the Dodo fed upon eels? The advocates of the Raptorial affinities of the Dodo, of whom we shall soon speak,will doubtless reply in the affirmative; but, as I hope shortly to demonstrate that it belongs to a family of birds all the other members of which are frugivorous, I can only regard the introduction of the eel as a pictorial license. In this, as in all his other paintings, Savery brought into juxtaposition animals from all countries, without regarding geographical distribution. His delineations of birds and beasts were wonderfully exact, but his knowledge of natural history probably went no further; and although the Dodo is certainly looking at the eel, yet we have no proof that he is going to eat it. The mere collocation of animals in an artistic composition, cannot be accepted as evidence against the positive truths revealed by comparative anatomy." (P.30.) The fifth and last old painting of the Dodo, is that now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and presented to it by Mr. Darby in 1813. Nothing is known of its previous history. It is the work of John Savery, the nephew of Roland, and is dated 1651. Its most peculiar character is the colossal scale on which it has been designed, the Dodo of this canvas standing about three feet and a half in height. "It is difficult," observes our author, "to assign a motive to the artist for thus magnifying an object already sufficiently uncouth in appearance. Were it not for the discrepancy of dates, I should have conjectured that this was the identical 'picture of a strange fowle hong out upon a cloth,' which attracted the notice of Sir Hamon Lestrange and his friends, as they walked London streets' in 1638; the delineations used by showmen being in general more remarkable for attractiveness than veracity."―(P. 31.) · We have now exhibited the leading facts which establish both the existence and extinction of this extraordinary bird: the existence, proved by the recorded testimony of the earlier navigators, the few but peculiar portions of structure which still remain among us, and the vera effigies handed down by artists coeval with the period in which the Dodo lived: the non-existence, deduced from the general progress of events, and the absence of all knowledge of the species since the close of the seventeenth century, although the resist the progress of humanity, and There is nothing imperfect in the productions of nature, although there are many organisms in which certain forms and faculties are less developed than in others. There are certainly, in particular groups, such things as rudimentary organs, which belong, as it were, not so much to the individual species, as to the general system which prevails in the larger and more comprehensive class to which such species belong; and in the majority of which these organs fulfil a frequent and obvious function, and so are very properly regarded as indispensable to the wellbeing of such as use them. But there are many examples in animal life which indicate that partitain species, for ever in an undeveloped cular parts of structure remain, in cerstate. In respect to teeth, for instance, the Greenland whale may be regarded as a permanent suckling; for that huge creature having no occasion for these organs, they never pierce the gums, although in early life they groove of the jaws. So the Dodo was are distinctly traceable in the dental a kind of permanent restling, covered with down instead of feathers, and with wings and tail (the oars and rudder of all aerial voyagers) so short and feeble as to be altogether inefficient for the purposes of flight. Why should such things be? We cannot say. Can any one say why they should not be? The question is both wide and deep, and they are most likely to plunge into it who can neither dive nor swim. with Mr. Strickland, that these apparently anomalous facts are, in reality, indications of laws which the great Creator has been pleased to form and follow in the construction of organized We agree beings,-inscriptions in an unknown hieroglyphic, which we may rest assured must have a meaning, but of which we have as yet scarcely learned the alphabet. "There appear, how ever, reasonable grounds for believing that the Creator has assigned to each class of animals a definite type or structure, from which He has never departed, even in the most exceptional or eccentric modifications of form." As to the true position of the Dodo in systematic ornithology, various opinions have been emitted by various men. The majority seem to have placed it in the great Rasorial or Gallinaceous order, as a component part of the family Struthionidæ, or ostrich tribe. "The bird in question," says Mr. Vigors," from every account which we have of its economy, and from the appearance of its head and foot, is decidedly gallina. ceous; and, from the insufficiency of its wings for the purposes of flight, it may with equal certainty be pronounced to be of the Struthious structure. But the foot has a strong hind-toe, and, with the exception of its being more robust, in which character it still adheres to the Struthionidæ, it corresponds to the Linnæan genus Crax, that commences the succeeding family. The bird thus becomes osculant, and forms a strong point of junction between those two contiguous groups."-Linn Trans. xiv. 484. M. de Blainville (in Nouv. Ann. du Mus. iv. 24) contests this opinion by various arguments, which we cannot here report, and concludes that the Dodo is a raptorial bird, allied to the vultures. Mr. Broderip, in his article before referred to, sums up the discussion as follows: "If the picture in the British Museum, and the cut in Bontius, be faithful representations of a creature then living, to make such a bird of prey-a vulture, in the ordinary acceptation of the termwould be to set all the usual laws of adaptation at defiance. A vulture with out wings! How was it to be fed? And not only without wings, but necessarily slow and heavy in progression on its clumsy feet. The Vulturidæ are, as we know, among the most active agents for removing the decomposing animal remains in tropical and inter-tropical climates, and they are provided with a prodigal development of wing, to waft them speedily to the spot tainted by the corrupt incumbrance. But no such powers of wing would be required by a bird appointed to clear away the decaying and decomposing masses of a luxuriant tropivegetable impurities, so to speak-and cal vegetation-a kind of vulture for such an office would not be by any means inconsistent with comparative slowness of pedestrian motion." Professor Owen, doubtless one of our greatest authorities, inclines toand considers the Dodo as an extremely wards an affinity with the vultures, modified form of the raptorial order. "Devoid of the power of flight, it could have had small chance of obtaining food class; and, if it did not exclusively subby preying upon the members of its own sist on dead and decaying organized matter, it most probably restricted its attacks to the class of reptiles, and to the littoral fishes, Crustacea, &c., which its welldeveloped back-toe and claw would enable it to seize, and hold with a firm gripe."-Transactions of the Zoological Society, iii. p. 331. We confess that, setting aside various other unconformable features in the structure of the Dodo, the fact, testified by various authorities, of its swallowing stones, and having stones in its gizzard, for the mechanical trituration of its food (a peculiarity unknown among the raptorial order), is sufficient to bar the above view, supported though it be by the opinion of our most distinguished living anatomist. F. Brandt (of which an abstract is In a recent memoir by Professor J. given in the Bulletin de la Class. Phys. de l'Acad. Imp. de St. Petersburg, vol. viii. No. 3) we have the following statement: The Dodo, a bird provided with divided toes and cursorial feet, is best classed in the order of the Waders, among which it appears, from its many peculiarities, (most of which, however, are quite referable to forms in this order), to be an anomalous link connecting several groups,-a link which, for the reasons above given, inclines towards the ostriches, and especially also towards the pigeons." We doubt the direct affinity to any order which contains the cursorial or species of the grallatorial order, an swift-running birds, very dissimilar in their prevailing habits to anything we know of the sluggish and sedentary Dodo. Professor Brandt may be regarded as having mistaken analogy for affinity; and, in Mr. Strickland's opinion, he has in this instance wandered from the true method of investigation, in his anxiety to discover a link connecting dissevered groups. What then is, or rather was, the Dodo? The majority of inquirers have no doubt been influenced, though unconsciously, by its colossal size, and have consequently sought its actual analogies only among such huge species as the ostrich, the vulture, and the albatross. But the range in each order is often enormous, as, for example, between the Falco cerulescens, or finch falcon of Bengal, an accipitrine bird not bigger than a sparrow, and an eagle of the largest size: or between the swallow-like stormy petrel and the gigantic pelican of the wilderness. It appears that Professor J. T. Rheinhardt of Copenhagen, who rediscovered the cranium of the Gottorf Museum, was the first to indicate the direct relationship of the Dodo to the pigeons. He has recently been engaged in a voyage round the world, but it is known that, before he left Copenhagen in 1845, he had called the attention of his correspondents, both in Sweden and Denmark, to "the striking affinity which exists between this extinct bird and the pigeons, especially the Trerons." The Columbine view is that taken up, and so admirably illustrated, by Mr. Strickland, the most recent as well as the best biographer of the Dodo. He re fers to the great strength and curvature of bill exhibited by several groups of the tropical fruit-eating pigeons, and adds: "If we now regard the Dodo as an extreme modification, not of the vultares, but of those vulture-like frugivorous pigeons, we shall, I think, class it in a group whose characters are far more consistent with what we know of its There is no à priori reason why a pigeon should not be so modified, in conformity with external circumstances, as to be incapable of flight, just as we see a grallatorial bird modified into an ostrich, and a diver into structure and habits a penguin. Now we are told that Mauritius, an island forty miles in length, and about one hundred miles from the nearest land, was, when discovered, clothed with dense forests of palms and various other trees. A bird adapted to feed on the fruits produced by these forests would, in that equable climate, have no occasion to migrate to distant lands; it would revel in the perpetual luxuries of tropical vegetation, and would have but little need of locomotion. Why then should it have the means of flying? Such a bird might wander from tree to tree, tearing with its powerful beak the fruits which strewed the ground, and digesting gizzard, enjoying tranquillity and abuntheir stony kernels with its powerful dance, until the arrival of man destroyed the balance of animal life, and put a term to its existence. Such, in my opinion, was the Dodo,-a colossal, brevipennate, frugivorous pigeon."—(P. 40.) For the various osteological and other details by which the Columbine character of the Dodo is maintained, and as we think established, we must refer our readers to Mr. Strickland's volume,* where those parts of the subject are very strikingly worked out by his able coadjutor, Dr. Melville. certain other extinct species which We shall now proceed to notice form the dead relations of the Dodo, sent the tribe from which they have just as the pigeons continue to repre departed. The island Rodriguez, eastward of the Mauritius, though not placed about three hundred miles more than fifteen miles long by six broad, possessed in modern times a peculiar bird, also without effective wings, and in several other respects resembling the Dodo. It was named Solitaire by the early voyagers, and forms the species Didus solitarius of systematic writers. The small island in question seems to have remained in a desert and unpeopled state until 1691, when a party of French Protestant refugees settled upon it, and remained for a couple of years. The Solitaire is thus described by their commander, Francois Leguat, who (in his Voyage et Avantures, 1708) has given us an interesting account both * In regard to the figures by which it is illustrated, we beg to call attention very specialty to Plates VIII, and IX., as the most beautiful examples of the lithographic art, applied to natural history, which we have yet seen executed in this country. |