Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/356

342 intermediate type between different families in the class of birds; in a word every supposition was adopted without approaching the truth, so long as the examination was insufficient. Reinhardt, after carefully examining the dodo's skull preserved in the Copenhagen Museum, thought he discovered characteristics pointing out a zoological relation beteenbetween [sic] the bird of Mauritius and pigeons. A few years later, a great step toward a solution was made. Strickland, availing himself to the utmost of all procurable materials, published in 1848 an important work on the dodo. The fragments we have noted as existing in the Oxford Museum, a head and a foot, had been stripped of integuments, so as to allow the study of the bony parts; a singular pigeon, the didunculus, having a large curved bill, slightly-developed wings, and feet well formed for walking, had been discovered in the Samoa Island by an American savant. This pigeon, recalling slightly the marks and habits of the dodo, notwithstanding its small size, furnished a new and most valuable term of comparison. Strickland succeeded in this way in proving that the dodo approached very remarkably the family of Columbids, that is, of pigeons.

After the researches of that able naturalist, no more light could be expected with regard to the famous bird formerly hunted out of existence by the Dutch sailors, without some important discovery. Such a one has quite lately been made in Mauritius Island. In draining a small marsh, poetically called Dream Swamp, George Clark discovered a quantity of dodos' bones. These remains, sent to England and very soon distributed throughout France, quickly attracted attentive study; they permitted the almost complete reconstruction of the skeleton, and in the present state of science all imaginable means of comparison were at hand. Several zoologists gladly profited by these advantages. Alphonse Milne-Edwards, thoroughly familiar with the osteological characteristics of birds, entered actively on the investigation, and we think has succeeded in determining precisely the natural affinities of this singular bird. Recognizing, with Strickland, the very close relations connecting the dodo with pigeons, Edwards concludes that the bird of Mauritius is the type of a special family. Thus the fragments of the history of this strangely annihilated being have been successively brought together, but the complete account of the species remains beyond the possibility of discovery.

Till the seventeenth century the Mascarene Islands were inhabited by many other birds of which the memory has been handed down to us by the merely superficial accounts of some travelers. These birds, some perfectly unfit for flight, others tolerably well endowed as regards the power of their locomotive organs, but having nothing to fear in the absence of men, lived undisturbed in the unpeopled regions of Rodriguez, Bourbon, and Mauritius. They have been destroyed by the attacks of settlers in a very short lapse of time; and now their bones, still collected in small quantities, are the only vestiges that