Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/416

360 living on the coasts of Madagascar have paid attention to the habits of these powerfully winged species, or collected whatever fragments of folk-lore may happen to exist among the coast-dwelling Malagasy with regard to these oceanic birds.

XI.—The last Order of birds, called in Mr. R. B. Sharpe's classification, the, includes in Madagascar two species of Puffin and two of Grebe. Of these latter, the lesser species, or Dabchick, appears to be almost identical with the bird found over Europe, Africa, and part of Asia. It is very common in all pieces of fresh water, where it may be seen swimming, diving down at any alarm, to reappear in a minute or two at a considerable distance. It is known by the name of Vivy, probably imitative of its plaintive little cry.

Although our rapid survey of the birds indigenous to Madagascar, and still to be found throughout its forests and plains, and its rivers and sea-coasts, is now completed, a word or two may be added as regards two or three species of, but which, at no very remote period, scoured its plains, and must have been very striking members of its avi-fauna. These were species of a struthious bird, allied to the ostrich, and still more nearly to the only recently extinct Moa or Dinornis of New Zealand. The largest species of this bird, named Æpyornis maximus, appears to have been about as large as a full-sized ostrich, but with extremely massive legs and feet. But it was still more peculiar from having laid the largest of all known eggs; these have a longer axis of twelve-and-a-quarter inches, with a shorter one of nine-and-three-eighth inches; they were therefore equal in capacity to six ostrich eggs, and to 150 average-sized hens' eggs.

In the opinion of some writers the strange stories in the Arabian Nights about an enormous bird called the Roc, or Rukh, which was able to take up an elephant in its talons,