Scientific Intelligence. — Zoology. 395 



was the stem of the Pita, by which name the Agave Americana 

 or American Aloe is known at Buenos Ayres, but am very 

 doubtful whether it is the stem of this particular species, as it 

 grows with great luxuriance at Buenos Ayres, where it is in 

 common use in forming inclosures ; yet the razor-straps used 

 there, I was informed, are brought from Rio de Janeiro. It 

 may therefore be presumed to consist of the stem of some other 

 of its congeners, which flourishes only in tropical America ; or 

 is it only under the influence of a tropical sun that the Agave 

 Americana has its pecuHar properties fully developed ? — Dr 

 Gillies. 



18. The Extinct Z)o£?o.— Naturalists have known for a long 

 time, but only through means of figures and descriptions, exe- 

 cuted in the sixteenth and the commencement of the seven- 

 teenth century, a great bird, incapable of flying, found in the 

 Isle of France after its discovery, but which appears to have 

 been since entirely extirpated. It was named Dronte, Dodo : 

 it is the genus Raphus of Masring, or the Didus of Linnaeus. 

 All that is preserved of this bird is a head and a foot deposited 

 in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and another foot, with a 

 figure painted in oil, after the living animal, which are in 

 the British Museum. Cauche, who also saw it in the Isle of 

 France, has given an imperfect description of it, in which he 

 says it had but three toes, which has caused some naturalists to 

 form a second species, under the name Diclics nazarenus^ the 

 first being called Didus ineptus. Leguat mentions another 

 bird, resembling the dodo, found in the Island of Rodrigue, 

 and which has been named Didus solitarius. Cuvier had sent 

 him, by an excellent naturalist in the Isle of France, M. Des- 

 jardins, the large bones of a bird found in the Island of Ro- 

 drigue, in part encrusted with calc-tuffa, which Cuvier conjec- 

 tured might be those of the dodo. Judging from the cranium, 

 sternum, and very small humerus, the thigh-bone, and tarsus, 

 he supposed they belonged to a galHnacious bird. M. Blain- 

 ville, in a learned memoir, endeavours to shew that the dodo 

 was a kind of vulture, which, he says, it resembles in beak, 

 head, claws, and other circumstances of its organization. Du- 



