THE DODO 217 



examples of this curiovis bird found their way to 

 Europe. Roelandt Savary, a Dutch artist, appears 

 to have made many paintings of the Dodo from 

 life, so that a few captives must have been brought 

 to Holland, and possibly to Austria. About 1638 

 a captive Dodo appears to have been exhibited in 

 London, Sir Hamon Lestrange recording how he 

 went into the show to see the strange bird that 

 was called by its keeper a "Dodo," and which 

 appears to have been an adept at swallowing 

 pebbles as big as nutmegs. For more than seventy 

 years the Ashmolean collection at Oxford appears 

 to have contained a specimen of the Dodo ; but 

 in 1755 it was destroyed, the head and right foot 

 only being preserved, and still in existence in the 

 museum of the Oxford University. A left foot of 

 the Dodo more than two hundred years old is in 

 the British Museum ; and a head of about the same 

 antiquity, so far as records go, is in the Museuin at 

 Copenhagen. 



How long this curious bird had dwelt in peace 

 upon the island of Mauritius, whence it came or 

 whether it had been evolved in the place where 

 man discovered it, are questions concerning the 

 Dodo which will probably never be satisfactorily^ 

 answered. Its extermination, however, was entirelv 



