30 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as tliey went, and leggs as they satt, suffering themselves to be caught faster 

 than they could be killed." "Wittnesse the generall carriage and behaviour of 

 this company, who being thus arrived and gott up to a libertie and choice of 

 eateing as much as they would, how monstrous was it to see, how greedily 

 everything was swallowed downe; how incredible to speake, how many dozen 

 of thoes poore silly creatures, that even offered themselves to the slaughter, 

 wer tumbled downe into their bottomlesse mawes: wherupon (as the sore effect 

 of so ranck a cause, the birds with all being exceedeingly fatt) then sodenly 

 followed a generall surfettinge, much sicknesse, and many of their deathes." 



The chances of finding bones of the cahow would probably be 

 better on Cooper's Island than elsewhere, if the above narratives of 

 Governor Butler and Mr. Hughes were correct. That the latter referred 

 to the cahow, though he did not mention the name of the 'silly birds,' 

 may be properly inferred, because of the season, 'beginning of the 

 newe yeare,' when the large party of starving settlers was sent there for 

 food. The egg-birds did not arrive until the first of May. This 

 famine and the sending of a large number of starving persons to feed 

 on the defenceless birds, at their breeding season, was unquestionably 

 the direct and principal cause of their rapid extermination, for it was 

 during the very next year (1616) that the first law was passed, 'but 

 overlate,' restricting the 'spoyle and havock of the cahowes.' We were 

 unable, for lack of time, to dig for the bones of the cahow on Cooper's 

 Island. The loose ground there is full of the holes of two species of 

 large land crabs. Such holes may have served the cahow for nesting 

 places. 



