M. Cuvicr's Notice of some supposed Bones of the Dido. 8'3 



In 1626, Ilcrbet spoke again of the Dronlcs; but it seems 

 that these birds, too clumsy to escape from their pursuers, 

 and too large to hide themselves easily, were completely de- 

 stroyed shortly after the establishment of Europeans on the 

 Isles of France and Bourbon. For a long time they have never 

 been seen, and some naturalists have even pretended that they 

 never existed, and that this species was formed from erroneous 

 descriptions of auks and penguins. The skin of a dodo is, 

 however, in existence ; the British Museum has a foot, and the 

 Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has another foot, with a head 

 in a very bad stale. We had long despaired of ever obtaining 

 any other part of the animal, when M. Cuvier made a most un- 

 expected discovery. M. Julien Desjardins, of the Isle of 

 France, having sent home some bones which he had found in 

 this island under beds of lava, and which belonged principally 

 to that great land tortoise, incorrectly named Tustudo indica, 

 M. Cuvicr observed amongst them many bones of a bird, and 

 soon determined that they must belong to the species of which 

 we arc speaking. These parts are a cranium, a sternum, and 

 some bones of the wing and leg. The sternum has a prominent 

 crest, which distinguishes it from that of the cassowary or the 

 ostrich, in which we can scarcely discern a median process ; 

 its anterior angle is very obtuse, — a character which allies it to 

 the sternum of the Gallina. The bird to which these bones 

 belonged, is also connected with this family by the form of 

 the cranium. The tarsus has processes corresponding to three 

 fingers and a thumb, as they are figured by (Jlusius and Ed- 

 wards. The humerus and fore-arm are short, and show that 

 the animal makes no use of its wings. M. Cuvicr came to tho 

 conclusion, from considerations founded on the structure of 

 these parts, that the dodo must be classed with the Gallina:. 



M. de Blainville remarked, after the termination of the read- 

 ing of M. Cuvicr's memoir, that for three years he had been 

 engaged in attempting to determine to what order of birds the 

 dodo must be referred ; he had procured a drawing of the 

 portions of this bird, preserved in the Museum of Oxford, and 

 of the head as represented in the painting from which Clusius' 

 figure had been taken. His conclusions differ from those of 

 M. Cuivcr, as he considers the dodo to belong to the vultures ; 

 he remarked that this bird has been found in places where there 

 is no grain to serve for its food, and offered the conjecture that 

 it lived principally upon fishes. He thought that the bad quality 

 of the flesh is another proof that it feeds upon living prey rather 

 than upon grain ; and he considered that there was no proof 

 that the bones produced by M. Cuvier had really belonged to 

 the dodo, for the prominence of the crest of the sternum in- 



