THE DODO AND ITS ILLUSTRATORS — FRIEDMANN 477 



was more probably done from life than was the painting, which con- 

 tained so many kinds of birds as to be obviously a studio resume of 

 many original studies, it seemed as if the treatment of the feet could 

 presumably be considered more realistic in the drawing than in the 

 oil painting. The drawing was then put on display together with the 

 Vienna picture when the Hapsburg treasures were exhibited at the 

 M. H. De Young Museum in San Francisco, when it received its first 

 publicity, first in the columns of the San Francisco Chronicle, and 

 then shortly thereafter in Life magazine, for December 11, 1950 

 (pp. 171-172), under the unacademic title "New-Fangled Dodo." 

 This brought it to the attention of the wide-reading art authorities 

 in Belgium and resulted in a request for its loan to the Ghent show in 

 1954. When studied in connection with the other Savery materials 

 assembled there, the authenticity of the Crocker drawing was ap- 

 parently unquestioningly accepted. 



The drawing definitely posed a problem: Was the dodo provided 

 with webbed feet or was it not? All the delineations of the bird de- 

 scribed and illustrated by Rothschild (1907) and by Hachisuka (1954) 

 show no definite webs. However, there is one picture, which was un- 

 known to these authors, that does agree with the Crocker drawing. 

 Both Rothschild and Hachisuka list an oil painting containing a dodo 

 by Savery, known to have been in the possession of a Dr. Otto Seiffer, 

 in Stuttgart, Germany, in the 1870's, but which had disappeared with- 

 out a trace some time before 1900. Fortunately for us, we do know 

 something of the appearance of the dodo in this painting, as it was 

 copied in pencil by the great naturalist Theodor von Heuglin, whose 

 drawing was then used as the basis for an engraving by M. Toller, 

 which, in turn, served as a frontispiece for Gustav Hartlaub's book 

 "Die Vogel Madagascars und der benachbarten Inselgruppen," pub- 

 lished in 1877. In this rendition the dodo is clearly shown to have webs 

 between the three front toes. It follows, then, that Savery depicted 

 the bird with webbed feet at least twice and that in all his other known 

 pictures he gave it unwebbed toes. 



It may be recalled at this point that many years ago George Clark, 

 a resident of Mauritius (1866, pp. 141-146), discovered quantities of 

 dodo bones in the mud in a marsh near Mahebourg, on that island. 

 Associated with them he found many bones of flamingoes, gallinules, 

 whimbrels, and egrets, all marsh-dwelling birds. Clark noted that 

 all the dodo bones appeared "to have belonged to adult birds ; and none 

 bear any marks of having been cut or gnawed, or of the action of fire. 

 This leads me to believe that all the Dodos of which the relics were 

 found here were denizens either of this marsh or its immediate neigh- 

 borhood, that they all died a natural death." Recently, Hachisuka 

 (1954, p. 85) has commented that the observations of several earlier 



