Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/184

 176 DODO those left by many animals which perished, ages ago from geological causes. Besides the rude drawings of the early voyagers given in Strickland's work, there are at least six oil paintings which are no doubt faith- ful copies of the living originals. The first of these paintings, the one copied in all books on natural history, and now in the British mu- seum, is anonymous, but probably by one of the artists who painted the following ones; there are three pictures by Roland Savery, one at the Hague, another in Berlin dated 1626, and the third in Vienna dated 1628; a fifth painting is in the Ashmolean museum, by John Savery, dated 1651 ; and a sixth in the gallery of the duke of Northumberland, at Sion House, painted by Goeimare, and dated 1627. < The Brincipal remains of the dodo are a foot in the ritish museum, and a head and foot in the Ashmolean museum at Oxford, England, ren- dered familiar by numerous casts; the latter are all that is left of the specimen in Trades- cant's museum, and all that was saved from the flames which consumed the decayed speci- mens by order of the trustees in 1755 ; the head preserves the beak and nostrils, the bare skin of the face, and the partially feathered occiput ; the eyes are dried within the sockets, but the horny end of the beak is gone. A cranium exists in the museum at Copenhagen ; a collection of bones at Paris, much incrusted with stalagmite, carried there in 1830 ; and others sent by Mr. Telfair to the Andersonian museum at Glasgow and to the London zoologi- cal society in 1833. The latter included a tibia and the head of a humerus of large size, with a broad articulating surface and a sudden reduc- tion of the size of the shaft. The generic char- acters are a strong bill, much longer than the head, with the culmen straight at first and then arched to the tip, which is acute and overlaps the lower mandible; the latter has the gonys short and suddenly curved upward ; the nostrils are in the membranous portion (which occupies two thirds of the bill), oblique and exposed ; the wings imperfect ; the tail apparently a tuft of five feathers, broad and curved upward ; the tarsi robust, moderately long, and scaled ; the outer toe is shorter than the inner, and the anterior toes are all free at the base ; the hind toe is long, on the same plane with the others, and scaled ; the claws are short, strong and blunt. Cuvier ranked the dodo with gallinaceous birds ; others have traced out its analogies with the ostrich and with the penguin. Most writers, before the work of Strickland, considered it a modified form of raptorial bird. Reinhardt of Copen- hagen first referred the dodo to the pigeon family, and Strickland and Melville followed out this idea. They consider it a frugivorous terrestrial pigeon, colossal and brevipennate, coming near in the bill to the genus treron (Vieill. ; vinago, Cuv.). The chief external characters of resemblance are the soft, depress- ed, and vascular nature of the long basal DODONA portion of the bill ; the extent of the bare skin around the eyes and forehead ; the hook- ed and compressed corneous portion of the upper mandible, overhanging the lower; the position of the nostril in the middle of the beak, and near its lower margin ; the sudden sinking from the forehead to the beak, and the rapid narrowing in front of the orbits; the short, robust tarsi, and expansion of the lower surface of the toes ; the low plane of the hind toe ; the relative lengths of the toes as com- pared with the ground pigeons, the absence of interdigital webs, and the short blunt claws. Among internal characters, gathered from the narratives of voyagers and the paintings of the bird from nature, are the presence of a large crop, a very muscular gizzard, the palatableness of the flesh, and the laying of a single egg. Be- sides these characters are the absence of the vo- mer; the form and direction of the bones, pro- cesses, and foramina of the skull ; the form of the metatarsal and tarso-metatarsal bones, pro- cesses, and canals ; and especially the passage of these canals on the outside of the posterior tar- sal ridge. Mr. Allis detected only 11 sclerotic plates, as in the pigeons, no other birds having so small a number. Its food was probably dates cocoanuts, mangoes, and such other fruits would fall from the tropical trees. Stricklai calls it " a young duck or gosling enlarged the dimensions of a swan ; .... a permanei nestling, clothed with down instead of feat ers, and with the wings and tail so short feeble as to be utterly unsubservient to flight.' While Strickland was preparing his work England, Dr. S. Cabot, jr., of Boston, publish- ed a paper in the "Journal of the Boston So- ciety of Natural History " (vol. v., p. 490), en- titled " The Dodo a Rasorial and not a Rapa- cious Bird ;" in this he conies to the same con- clusions as the first mentioned author, and without any knowledge of his views. He says "that the dodo was a gigantic pigeon, and that, as its general shape, feathering, &c., re- semble more strongly the young than the adult pigeon, we may perhaps be allowed to sur- mise that it properly belongs to an earlier epoch than the present, and has become ex- tinct because its time was run." Prof. Brandt of St. Petersburg, in 1848, maintained the affinity of the dodo to the charadriadca or plovers, which he styles pigeoned-formed or dove-like waders. The testimony seems over- whelming in favor of the columbine affinities of the dodo. In the island of Rodriguez lived another large brevipennate bird, the solitaire, allied to the pigeons. DODONA, an ancient city of Epirus, in N". Greece, celebrated as the seat of the most an- cient oracle of Greece, which ranked with those of Delphi and Ammonium. It is the only place of great celebrity in Greece of which the situation is not exactly known ; no vestige of it can be discovered. Leake conjectures that its site was at the S. end of Lake Janina (anc. Pambotis) ; others place it near the source