478 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



writers that the dodo "was a shore bird are probably based upon con- 

 clusions drawn from most of the oil-paintings, which represent the 

 bird standing near, or even in, water. Artists who painted the Dodo 

 from life doubtless found them kept, not in cages, since they could not 

 fly, but in enclosures along with other ornamental birds, such as Ducks, 

 Geese, Storks, etc., i. e., near a body of water . . . He possessed no 

 power to swim, as Peter Mundy clearly states." In fact, Peter Mundy 

 (Journal, 1914) who was in Mauritius from 1628 to 1634, writes of 

 "Dodoes, a strange kind of fowle, twice as big as a Goose, that can 

 neither flye nor swimm beinge Cloven footed." 



In response to my request, R. E. Moreau kindly made a careful 

 examination of the actual foot of a dodo (pi- 4) preserved in the Uni- 

 versity Museum at Oxford, and he reports that there is no trace 

 of webbing between the toes, agreeing in this respect with the bulk 

 of the illustrations and with the literature. Moreau suggests that 

 it is conceivable that the heavy phalangial pads under the toes might 

 have flattened out somewhat in a captive bird walking on a hard sur- 

 face. This might have suggested webs, but not more than that. 



Apparently Savery himself was not too certain of the foot structure, 

 as he did not endow the dodo with webs in most of his pictures ; the fact 

 that he did so twice may be attributed to carelessness, but it does 

 suggest that he, our main first-hand observer of the bird in life, prob- 

 ably saw it but seldom, or only casually. His renditions of other kinds 

 of birds are more consistently alike than are his dodos. It is a sad 

 thing that the results of further study of this remarkable bird and its 

 literature and iconography should reduce rather than enhance the little 

 we know of it, but we cannot avoid the conclusion that our primary 

 source of information about its appearance did not know it very well. 



If we accept the Crocker Gallery drawing as an original by Roelandt 

 Savery, as is done by the compiler of the Ghent catalog (who was in 

 a better position to decide this than anyone else), it becomes possible 

 to point out the sources of two better-known renditions of the dodo. 

 The first of these is a painting by Jan Goeimare (pi. 2, fig. 1), done 

 in 1627, now in Sion House, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland. 

 It shows a dodo bending down over a smew. The painting is obviously 

 a studio invention, as these two birds would not occur together in na- 

 ture, and from this it follows that the painting was probably done 

 from sketches made separately of the two birds. The dodo in it seems 

 to be merely a poor version of the dodo to the right in the Crocker 

 Gallery sheet. The body has become formless, the wings obviously 

 wrong and made to conform with those of ordinary birds although 

 reduced in size, the tail greatly minimized, and the pattern of the head 

 altered, giving it a double frontal band and eliminating the peculiar 

 cross-net lines on the cranium. Similarly, we find that Bontekoe's 



