272 Mons. A. Milne-Edwai-ds on the 



the Pigeons than the Dodo and Pezophaps, which they other- 

 wise resembled in their wings, unfit for flight, in the want of a 

 tail, or having only a rudimentary one, and in the number and 

 disposition of their toes." 



As type of the genus M. de Selys-Longchamps gives Apter- 

 ornis solitaria — that is to say, the Solitaire of Reunion, of which 

 we have no remains. Indeed we only know it hy the accounts 

 of some travellers, and especially of Carre and Dubois'^. This 

 bird, whose plumage was white or tinged with yellow, may be 

 perhaps the white Dodo, represented in a picture exhibited to 

 the Zoological Society of London, and reproduced in a memoir 

 on the subject published in its ' Transactions ' [Vol. vi. pp. 

 373-376, pi. 62]. 



The second species of Apterornis of M. de Selys, which he 

 calls A. carulescens, is nothing else than the Oiseau bleu of which 

 Dubois gives us some particulars which I here quote : — " Oyseaux 

 hleus, as large as the Solitaires, have their plumage all blue, 

 their bill and feet red, and in form like those of fowls. They 

 do not fly, but they run so quickly that a dog can hardly catch 

 them in a course. They are very good." 



The blue colour of the plumage, the hue of the feet and the 

 bill, and the rapidity with which they run would seem to indi- 

 cate well a bird belonging to the group Porphyrio. Strickland 

 had fully seized this idea when he said, " I should have been 

 disposed to refer the ' Oiseau bleu ' to the genus Porphyrio, 

 were we not told that they were the size of the Solitaire, i. e., 

 of a large Goose, that the feet resembled those of a hen, and 

 that they never fly." [' The Dodo ', &c. p. 59.] 



* [In a note appended to a translation of Prof. Sclilegel's paper "On 

 some Extinct Gigantic Birds of the Mascaiene Islands" (Ibis, 1866, pp. 146- 

 168), which was contained in the ' Annales des Sciences Natm-elles — 

 Zoologie ' for 1866 (5th ser. torn, vi, pp. 25-49), M. A. Milne-Edwards 

 mentioned that the MS. journal of the " Sieur D. B.", in the possession of 

 the Zoological Society, had been published at Paris in 1674, and that the 

 author's name was Du Bois. We have lately leamt that this fact was 

 pointed out seventeen years ago by Mr. Pinkerton in ' Notes and Queries ' 

 (Ist ser. vol, vi. p. 83, July 25, 1852) ; and this gentleman has been kind 

 enough to inform us that there is a copy of the work in the British 

 Museum ("King's Library, no. 270, h, 31 "). — Ed.]. 



