SOLITAIRE. 239 



species was most nearly allied to the pigeons of all known birds. Its general appear- 

 ance is described by several of the early voyagers in their quaint manner, and Bontius 

 writes of it as follows : " The Dronte or Dodaers is for bigness of mean size between 

 an ostrich and a turkey, from which it partly differs in shape and partly agrees with 

 them, especially with the African Ostriches if you consider the rump quills and 

 feathers ; so that it was like a pigmy among them if you regard the shortness of its 

 legs. It hath a great ill-favoured head, covered with a kind of membrane resembling 

 a hood; great black eyes; a bending prominent fat neck, an extraordinary long, 

 strong, bluish-white bill, only the ends of each mandible are of a different colour, that, 

 of the upper black, that of the nether yellowish, both sharp-pointed and crooked. Its 

 gape, huge wide, as being naturally very voracious. Its body is fat and round, cov- 

 ered with soft gray feathers after the manner of an ostrich ; in each side, instead of 

 hard wing-feathers or quills, it is furnished with small soft-feathered wings of a 

 yellowish-ash colour; and behind the rump instead of a tail, is adorned with five small 

 curled feathers of the same colour. It hath yellow legs, thick, but very short ; four 

 toes in each foot ; solid, long, as it were scaly, armed with strong black claws. It is 

 a slow-paced and stupid bird, and which easily becomes a prey to the fowlers. The 

 flesh, especially of the breast, is fat, esculent, and so copious that three or four dodos 

 will sometimes suffice to fill one hundred seamen's bellies. If they be old, or not well 

 boiled, they are of difficult concoction, and are salted and stored up for provision of 

 victual. There are found in their stomachs stones of an ash colour, of divers figures 

 and magnitudes, yet not bred there, as the common people and seamen fancy, but 

 swallowed by the bird ; as though by this mark also nature would manifest that these 

 fowls are of the ostrich kind, in that they swallow any hard things though they do not 

 digest them." 



The dodo laid but one large egg and the nest was only a heap of fallen leaves 

 loosely gathered together. Sir T. Herbert, who saw this bird in 1625, was not in any 

 way favorably impressed with it, as he says, " her body is round and fat, which occa- 

 sions the slow pace, or that her corpulence, and so great as few of them weigh less 

 than fifty pounds ; meat it is with some, but better to the eye than stomach, such as 

 only a strong appetite can vanish." 



The 'solitaire' or 'solitary,' Pezophaps solitaria, was also of large size, somewhat 

 taller than a turkey, and said to weigh forty-five pounds. Leguat, in his voyage to the 

 East Indies, published in 1708, gives the following description of the bird. "The 

 feathers of the male are of a brown-gray colour; the feet and beak are like a Turkey's, 

 but a little more crooked. They have scarce any tail, but their hind part covered 

 with feathers is roundish. Their neck is straight and a little longer in proportion 

 than a Turkey's when it lifts up its head. Its eye is black and lively, and its head 

 without comb or cop. They never fly, their wings are too little to support the weight 

 of their bodies ; they serve only to beat themselves, and flutter when they call one 

 another. They will whirl about twenty or thirty times together on the same side dur- 

 ing the space of four or five minutes. The motion of their wings makes then a noise 

 very like that of a rattle, and one may hear it two hundred paces off. The bone of 

 the wing grows greater towards the extremity, and forms a little round mass under 

 the feathers as big as a musket ball. That and its beak are the chief defence of the 



~ 



bird. It is very hard to catch it in the woods, but easier in open places, because we 

 run faster than they and sometimes we approach them without much trouble. From 

 March to September they are extremely fat and taste admirably well, especially while 



