Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/355

Rh find it vain; far less than a century had sufficed for the destruction of a species once abundant at one point on the globe.

At the period the dodo lived in, the natural sciences were very-little advanced, and the animal was not the subject of any serious study. Long afterward, zoologists continuing to be struck with the unusual interest attaching to this extinct bird, which was quite unique in creation, felt a laudable desire to complete the imperfections left by ancient accounts of it; but the materials remaining to throw light on the subject were very scanty. The stuffed specimen that had figured in the Oxford Museum had been sacrificed in 1755. The vice-chancellor of the university, and the other commissioners charged by Ashmole with the care of preserving the treasures he had collected, came at an unfortunate hour, as the excellent Strickland says, on their yearly visit to the museum. The poor specimen, more than a century old and doubtless much dilapidated, yet invaluable as the last of the dodos, was committed to the flames by order of the intelligent managers. By good luck, again, they preserved the head and one foot of the animal; scientific interest had nothing to do with the rescue; it was what the world calls an act of good administration.

When modern zoologists undertook to examine the characteristics and natural affinities of the dodo, the relics saved consisted only of the head and foot existing in the Oxford Museum, a foot in the collection of the British Museum at London, a head at Copenhagen forgotten for two hundred years and found again by chance, and a beak at Prague, more recently recovered.

These wretched remnants and the sketches already mentioned, when examined and compared from different points of view, opened a field for dissensions. A single fact was patent to all eyes, the very peculiar, very abnormal character of the dodo. Naturalists, as is usually the case, at first struck by peculiarities of a secondary order, marks of adaptation to a special kind of life, gave their most particular attention to the rudimentary state of the wings in the bird of Mauritius Island. A similar condition of the organs of flight existing in ostriches, and cassowaries, the idea of a more or less close relation between the dodo and those birds suggested itself. Dwelling on a consideration of the same kind, a resemblance was found to penguins and auks, with no greater reasonableness. Prof. de Blainville, paying more regard to the shape of the bill than any thing else, saw in the dodo a representative of the vulture group. Yet a bird of prey incapable of flight, unable to pursue its victims, might seem to us a very extraordinary creature; it must be supposed in such a case that snails, insects, and worms, were the animal's usual food, the resource of dead bodies having scarcely any existence in a region without mammals, like the Mascarene Islands. It has been supposed that the dodo had affinities with the gallinaceous tribes, that is with cocks, Guinea-fowl, turkeys, and some stilt-birds, and that it represented an