Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/750

Rh 732 B I B D S [EXTIRPATED FORMS. the first allied to Ocydromiis, and the last, which has sur vived to our own clay, though most likely extirpated within the last fifteen years, much resembling Porphyrio. 1 In company with these fossil or sub-fossil remains are often associated bones of other forms, which now seem doomed to destruction but still exist. Finally must be mentioned Dromceornis australis, an extinct Struthious bird, which formerly inhabited Australia, and was allied to Dromceus, the well-known Emeu. BIRDS KECENTLY EXTIRPATED. . From the consideration of Fossil Birds we are natu rally led to treat of those which have been extirpated in modern times, and are made known to us by evidence of various kinds, and more or less old. The most re markable of these is the Dodo (Didus ineptus), which, on the discovery of Mauritius by the Portuguese under Mascaregnas in the beginning of the IGth century, was found to inhabit that island. Voyagers have vied with each other in describing or depicting its uncouth appear ance, and its name has almost passed into a byword ex pressive of all that is effete. Clumsy, flightless, and defenceless, it soon succumbed, not so much to the human invaders of its realm as to the domestic beasts which accompanied them, and there gaining their liberty, un checked by much of the wholesome discipline of nature, ran riot, to the utter destruction (as will be seen) of no in considerable portion of the Mauritian fauna. The latest known testimony of the Dodo s existence is furnished by the copy of a journal (now in the British Museum) kept by one Benjamin Harry, mate of the ship &quot; Berkley Castle, :) which shews that it survived until July 1681. It had its life most likely sometime longer, but of this there is no evidence forthcoming. For a century and a half all that was known of it was derived from the quaint and some times questionable accounts of early voyagers ; certain pictures, mostly by Dutch artists for the bird was not infrequently sent alive to Europe, and the traffic of the East Indies was then chiefly in the hands of the Nether- landers which pictures, however grotesque, were doubtless for the most part faithful portraits ; and a few scattered relics a foot in the British Museum, a head and foot at Oxford, a perfect skull at Copenhagen, and a fragmentary one at Prague. Still these (or indeed the Danish speci men alone) were enough to enable Professor Reinhardt to determine the affinity of the lost bird to the Pigeons, an alliance not before surmised, but one which scarcely anybody now disputes. In 1866, however, Mr George Clark of Mauritius discovered in the peat of a pool (the Mare aux Songes) in that island an abundance of Dodos bones (Ibis, 1866, p. 141) ; and these, when trans mitted to Europe, informed naturalists as to nearly every part of its osseous structure, which was soon after de scribed in detail by Professor Owen (Trans. Zool. Soc. vi. p. 49). lire of But the Dodo is not the only member of its family i n - that has vanished. The little island which has succes sively borne the name of Mascaregnas, England s Forest, Bourbon, and Reunion, 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 1 A second species now referred to Notornis is the Gallinula alba of Latham, which lived on Lord Howe s (and probably Norfolk) Island. No specimen is known to have been brought to Europe for more than eighty years, and only one is believed to exist namely, in the museum at Vienna (Ibis, 1873, p. 44, plate 10). Recent enquiries, made at the present writer s request, have failed to furnish any result. The bird is doubtless extinct. (Cf. Rowley, Ornithological Miscellany, pp. 38-48.) meagre in the extreme, and though two figures one by Bontekoe (circa 1646), and another by Pierre Witthoos (ob. 1693) have been thought to represent it (Trans. Zool. Soc. vi. p. 373, plate 62), their identification is but conjectural. Yet the existence of such a bird is indubitable. Far to the eastward of these two sister islands lies a Solitair Rodrigi FIG. 43. The Solitaire of Rodriguez (l ezophn : s solita. ius}. From Leguat B figure. third Rodriguez. Here there formerly lived another Didine bird, sufficiently distinct from the Dodo of Mauri- F IO. 44. Extinct CresttJ Parrot of Mauritius (Lophoptittacut mawitiantu). From a tracing by M. A. Milne-Edwards of the original drawing in a MS. Journal kept during Wolphart Harmausx.i.oifs voyage to Mauritius (A.D. 1601- 1602), penes H. Schlegel (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1875, j&amp;gt;. 350). Reduced. tius to form a genus of its ovrn.Pezop?iaps solitarius, the