Miscellaneous. 437 
of great value, completing up to a certain point the indications given 
by Leguat, and nearly forty years subsequent to his narrative. 
It is a manuscript found in the Ministére de la Marine, entitled 
** Relation de Vile Rodrigue.” It was discovered by M. Rouillard, 
a magistrate of Mauritius, who was making some special investiga- 
tions in these archives. I was informed of this fact by Mr. Alfred 
Newton *, Professor at the University of Cambridge; and he re- 
quested me to search in the archives of the ministry in order to 
settle the time when this document was written; for it bears no 
date and no author’s name, and is bound up together with other 
manuscripts in vol. xi. of the ‘ Correspondance de Vile de France,’ 
année 1760. Is this date the correct one? and may we conclude 
that the birds in question were still living in 1760—that is to say, 
scarcely more than a hundred years ago? 
I am convinced that this document is older than those with which 
it has been combined; and if I have not been able to discover its 
author, I have been able to fix its period. In fact I found in vol. i. 
of the ‘ Correspondance générale’ an old inventory of reports and 
letters, from 1719 to 1732, contained in the portfolios of the office 
before they were collected and bound in volumes. In this enumera- 
tion is found our ‘ Relation de l’ile Rodrigue’ intercalated between 
some documents of the date 1729 and others of 1730 and 1731. 
Its inventory number corresponds exactly to that found on the 
‘ Relation ’ itself; it is “No. 1, Carton 29.” This indication there- 
fore enables us to establish precisely, if not the time when the 
report was written, at least when it was transmitted to the Com- 
pagnie des Indes. It is, then, anterior to 1730, and it was by mis- 
take that it was bound up with the Correspondence of 1760. 
I should moreover remark that, according to the above-mentioned 
inventory, Carton No. 29 must have also contained a ‘ deliberation 
of the Council” (of the Compagnie des Indes), “ July 20, 1725, as 
to taking possession of the island of Diego Ruys ”’—that is, of Rod- 
riguez. There is consequently reason to suppose that after the de- 
liberation the Company commissioned one of its officers to go and 
study the resources of the island, and find out if it was advisable to 
make a settlement there. Our ‘ Relation,’ transmitted four years 
after, seems to answer completely questions of this sort. ‘lhe un- 
known author of the report first gives all the information necessary 
to facilitate the landing, indicating all the islets and reefs; he then 
reviews the animal and vegetable productions, and has not forgotten 
the survey of the soil and its arable qualities. 
This account permits us to affirm that forty years after Leguat’s 
departure the fauna of Rodriguez still included all the interesting 
ornithic types described by him, and that their extinction was sub- 
sequent to that date. It also gives us details of the habits, forms, 
and colours of several species of which I had recognized the ex- 
istence and zoological affinities from their bones alone; and it con- 
firms the results at which I had arrived. 
* Prof. A. Newton presented to the Zoological Society of London, at its 
meeting on the 19th January, 1875, some extracts from the ‘ Relation.’ 
