344 THE POPULAB SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



know that tlie hermit-bird represented a special type, having close 

 affinities with the dodo and the pigeon. A singular detail leads us to 

 place full reliance on Leguat's observations. Our traveler had said, 

 in speaking of the males of this Rodriguez bird : " The wing of the pin- 

 ion thickens at its end, and forms a little round mass like a musket- 

 ball under the feathers ; this, with the bill, is the bird's chief defense." 

 This little round mass has been found in the shape of a bony promi- 

 nence on that part of the limb called the metacarpus. 



At the Isle of Bourbon, as at Mauritius and Rodriguez, the first 

 explorers found many birds that were clumsy and unable to fly. A 

 species resembling the dodo, described by Dubois, as also by the 

 Dutch Bontrekoe and the Englishman Castleton, was completely white, 

 like a young lamb. A sketch of this bird has lately been found in an 

 old picture ; it is a true white dodo, with a yellow tinge on the wings. 

 A hermit observed by the traveler Carre in 1688, probably quite dis- 

 tinct from the Rodriguez species, was magnificent : " The beauty of 

 its plumage," the account says, " is lovely to behold, being a change- 

 able color verging to yellow." A large bluebird with red beak and 

 feet was in all probability of the group of superb sultan-fowls which 

 zoologists call the porphyrions and notornis. All these birds have 

 completely disappeared. 



Several species, now extinct, inhabited Mauritius in particular, as 

 the dodo, less than a century and a half ago. Francis Cauche, as also 

 a Protestant missionary named Hoffman, described " red fowls with 

 snipes' bills" which were taken by hand on offering them a bit of red 

 cloth. It would be hard to determine the species by so vague an in- 

 dication, but a piece of good fortune lately came to our aid. Some 

 paintings on vellum have been discovered in the private library 

 founded by the Austrian Emperor Francis I. ; one represents the dodo, 

 another the snipe-beaked hen. De Frauenfeld has published these 

 drawings, and, greatly struck by the extraordinary peculiarities of the 

 red fowl without wings, he has named for it a genus, ApTianapteryx^ 

 without, however, succeeding in deciding upon the bird's natural 

 affinities. More fortunate, Milne-Edwards had seen some of the bones 

 taken from the famous Dream Swamp, and he clearly recognized in 

 the Aphanapteryx a type of the rail family. With this family, and 

 particularly with the group of the swift-runners, well represented in 

 Australia, the same zoologist, after examining some relics, successfully 

 connected the plump waders, covered with light-gray feathers, which 

 Leguat delighted in during his residence at Rodriguez. The same 

 exact historian of the Mascarene Islands, as they once were, has also 

 drawn the description of a very remarkable bird that haunted the 

 marshes of Mauritius. " Numbers of certain birds are seen," says 

 this traveller, " which they call giants, because their head rises six 

 feet high. They are extremely high on the legs, and have a very long 

 body, no larger than that of a goose. They are entirely white except 



