Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/363

Rh the gigantic dinornis in size. The first important discovery of remains left by this lost species is quite recent. It was announced to the French Academy of Sciences by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the 27th of January, 1851. Enormous eggs brought to France by Alfred Abadie, captain of a merchantman, excited amazement in every one, savants and ignorant alike. These eggs, six times as large as an ostrich's, and equal to 148 hen's-eggs, had a capacity of more than 1$3/4$ gallon. Nothing more astonishing had ever been seen. From a few scattered bits of bones found in the same spot, Saint-Hilaire traced vestiges of the bird to which the eggs must be attributed, and designated the animal by the name of the Æpyornis maximus. The island of Madagascar presenting so extended a surface, unexplored in all parts, it was readily believed that the æpyornis might still be wandering over its vast solitudes, for in Madagascar, as in New Zealand, the natives speak of enormous birds as existing in the woods and mountains. Since the last exploration of the great African island, this seems an improbability. An intelligent young naturalist, Grandidier, made a voyage to Madagascar a few years ago; after gaining much information, he returned once more to the region which promised new discoveries. Quite lately, while making excavations in the midst of a marshy tract in Amboulisate, on the west coast of the island, Grandidier had the good fortune to collect some bones that seem to belong to the bird with those incomparable eggs. These fragments, it is true, are nothing more than two vertebræ, a thigh-bone, and a leg-bone; they enabled Milne-Edwards to demonstrate the relationship of the æpyornis with the ostrich, cassowary, and dinornis, and to prove the fact that the Madagascar bird, with a heavier body and stouter legs than any of the dinornis had, yet was not so high in stature as the largest species of New Zealand. Remains of the æpyornis of inferior size found in small quantity disclose, moreover, the existence of several species belonging to the same type, and inhabiting the same region at an area doubtless not very remote.

Every one in France and other parts of Europe is aware of the rapid decrease of birds. The larger kinds will, perhaps, be exterminated before a century passes. The bustard, which, in Buffon's time, was commonly enough found in the plains of Poitou and Champagne, is now extremely rare. The tétras, better known under the name of the great heath-cock, formerly abundant in our forests, is now found only in a few localities. Game so superb offers irresistible temptations to sportsmen.

In past ages the great auks (Alca impennis), fitted for swimming, but unable to fly, abounded on the shores of the arctic regions; they have been destroyed, annihilated. At a rather remote period they were common on all the coasts of Scandinavia, as in the Orkney and Faroe islands, and on the banks of Newfoundland; at a date nearer our own, they were still frequently seen in Lapland and Greenland;