Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/358

344 know that the hermit-bird represented a special type, having close affinities with the dodo and the pigeon. A singular detail leads us to place full reliance on Leguat's observations. Our traveler had said, in speaking of the males of this Rodriguez bird: "The wing of the pinion thickens at its end, and forms a little round mass like a musket-ball under the feathers; this, with the bill, is the bird's chief defense." This little round mass has been found in the shape of a bony prominence on that part of the limb called the metacarpus.

At the Isle of Bourbon, as at Mauritius and Rodriguez, the first explorers found many birds that were clumsy and unable to fly. A species resembling the dodo, described by Dubois, as also by the Dutch Bontrekoe and the Englishman Castleton, was completely white, like a young lamb. A sketch of this bird has lately been found in an old picture; it is a true white dodo, with a yellow tinge on the wings. A hermit observed by the traveler Carré in 1688, probably quite distinct from the Rodriguez species, was magnificent: "The beauty of its plumage," the account says, "is lovely to behold, being a changeable color verging to yellow." A large bluebird with red beak and feet was in all probability of the group of superb sultan-fowls which zoologists call the porphyrions and notornis. All these birds have completely disappeared.

Several species, now extinct, inhabited Mauritius in particular, as the dodo, less than a century and a half ago. Francis Cauche, as also a Protestant missionary named Hoffman, described "red fowls with snipes' bills" which were taken by hand on offering them a bit of red cloth. It would be hard to determine the species by so vague an indication, but a piece of good fortune lately came to our aid. Some paintings on vellum have been discovered in the private library founded by the Austrian Emperor Francis I.; one represents the dodo, another the snipe-beaked hen. De Frauenfeld has published these drawings, and, greatly struck by the extraordinary peculiarities of the red fowl without wings, he has named for it a genus, Aphanapteryx, without, however, succeeding in deciding upon the bird's natural affinities. More fortunate, Milne-Edwards had seen some of the bones taken from the famous Dream Swamp, and he clearly recognized in the Aphanapteryx a type of the rail family. With this family, and particularly with the group of the swift-runners, well represented in Australia, the same zoologist, after examining some relics, successfully connected the plump waders, covered with light-gray feathers, which Leguat delighted in during his residence at Rodriguez. The same exact historian of the Mascarene Islands, as they once were, has also drawn the description of a very remarkable bird that haunted the marshes of Mauritius. "Numbers of certain birds are seen," says this traveller, "which they call giants, because their head rises six feet high. They are extremely high on the legs, and have a very long body, no larger than that of a goose. They are entirely white except