AJVIMALS EXTINCT IN THE HISTORIC PERIOD. 341 



find it vain ; far less than a century had sufficed for the destruction 

 of a species once abundant at one point on the globe. 



At the period the dodo lived in, the natural sciences were very- 

 little advanced, and the animal was not the subject of any serious 

 study. Long afterv>^ard, zoologists continuing to be struck with the 

 unusual interest attaching to this extinct bird, which was quite 

 unique in creation, felt a laudable desire to complete the imperfections 

 left by ancient accounts of it ; but the materials remaining to throw 

 light on the subject were very scanty. The stuffed specimen that had 

 figured in the Oxford Museum had been sacrificed in 1755. The vice- 

 chancellor of the university, and the other commissioners charged by 

 Ashmole with the care of preserving the treasures he had collected, 

 came at an unfortunate hour, as the excellent Strickland says, on 

 their yearly visit to the museum. The poor specimen, more than a 

 century old and doubtless much dilapidated, yet invaluable as the 

 last of the dodos, was committed to the flames by order of the intelli- 

 gent managers. By good luck, again, they preserved the head and 

 one foot of the animal ; scientific interest had nothing to do with the 

 rescue ; it was what the world calls an act of good administration. 



When modern zoologists undertook to examine the characteristics 

 and natural affinities of the dodo, the relics saved consisted only of 

 the head and foot existing in the Oxford Museum, a foot in the collec- 

 tion of the British Museum at London, a head at Copenhagen forgot- 

 ten for two hundred years and found again by chance, and a beak at 

 Prague, more recently recovered. 



These wretched remnants and the sketches already mentioned, 

 when examined and compared from different points of view, opened 

 a field for dissensions. A single fact was patent to all eyes, the very 

 peculiar, very abnormal character of the dodo. !N"aturalists, as is 

 usually the case, at first struck by peculiarities of a secondary order, 

 marks of adaptation to a special kind of life, gave their most particu- 

 lar attention to the rudimentary state of the wings in the bird of 

 Mauritius Island. A similar condition of the organs of flight existing 

 in ostriches, and cassowaries, the idea of a more or less close relation 

 between the dodo and those birds suggested itself. Dwelling on a 

 consideration of the same kind, a resemblance was found to penguins 

 and auks, with no greater reasonableness. Prof, de Blainville, pay- 

 ing more regard to the shape of the bill than any thing else, saw in 

 the dodo a representative of the vulture group. Yet a bird of prey 

 incapable of flight, unable to pursue its victims, might seem to us a 

 very extraordinary creature ; it must be supposed in such a case that 

 snails, insects, and worms, were the animal's usual food, the resource 

 of dead bodies having scarcely any existence in a region without 

 mammals, like the Mascarene Islands. It has been supposed that the 

 dodo had affinities with the gallinaceous tribes, that is with cocks, 

 Guinea-fowl, turkeys, and some stilt-birds, and that it represented an 



