of a Gigantic Bird from Madagascar. 165 



ference of dimension in favour of the first ; but this difFerence is 

 very slight, and might be explained as well by the diversities of 

 proportion as by an inequality of height. 



Can so gigantic a species, which has lived without doubt in 

 times not far remote from our own, and of which it cannot 

 even be asserted that it has entirely disappeared from the surface 

 of the globe*, have remained so long, to the present day, without 

 anything having revealed its existence to the naturalists of 

 Europe ? We could not postpone, until the appearance of the 

 memoir which we intend to publish on the JEpyornis, adverting 

 to some indications relative to this bu-d which science already 

 possesses. 



Shall we place Flacourt amongst the number of the authors 

 who have known, at least by hearsay, the gigantic bird of Ma- 

 dagascar ? Is it the jEpyornis which that celebrated traveller 

 mentioned, two centuries ago, under the name of Vouron-Patra ? 

 "It is," he sayst, "a large bird which haunts the Ampatres, 

 and lays eggs like an Ostrich ; it is a species of Ostrich. Those 

 of the said places are not able to take it : it seeks the most de- 

 sert places." It is hardly necessary to add, that a passage so 

 vague may quite as well, and better, apply to a bird of a high 

 stature, but nevertheless lower than that of the Ostrich, as to a 

 species so gigantic as the ^pyornis. 



If Flacourt did not know the JEpyornis, there is at all events 

 another French traveller, who unquestionably heard speak of 

 it, and who even saw one of its eggs, very similar to those which 

 we have described above. In one of the additions which Mr. 

 Strickland has recently made J to his remarkable work on the 

 Dodo§, is found a document formerly considered as fabulous, 

 but whose scientific interest is now placed beyond a doubt. 

 Under the title " Supposed existence of a gigantic bird at Ma- 

 dagascar," Mr. Strickland has given a curious relation, made in 

 1848, by a French merchant, M. Dumarele, to Mr. Joliffe, Sur- 

 geon of the Geyser, and which the latter extracted from his 

 private journal : M. Dumarele stated that at Port-Leven, on the 

 north-west end of the Isle of Madagascar, he saw a gigantic egg, 

 the shell of which was as thick as a Spanish dollar, and which 

 held "the almost incredible quantity of thirteen wine quart 

 bottles of fluid." M. Dumarele offered to purchase the egg 

 and send it to Europe ; but the natives declined seUing it, as it 



* The Notornis, at first known by subfossil debris, and regarded as an 

 extinct species, has lately been found alive in New Zealand. See Ann. Nat. 

 Hist, for November 1850, p. 398. 



t Histoire de la grande He de Madagascar, edit, of 1768, p. 165. 



+ The Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist. No. 23 (November 1849), p. 338. 



§ The Dodo and its Kindred, London, 1848. 



