478 Recent Ornithological Publications. 



VOGEL {qnce fif a nautisDoBATins propter foedamposterioris partis 

 crassitiem nuncupatur), qualis viua Amsterodamum perlata est ex 

 Insula MAVRITII. Anno M.DC.XXVI/' followed beneath by 

 " Manu Adriani VenniJ Pictoris." Of this figure he furnishes a 

 fac-simile, accompanied by some remarks, in the Eleventh Volume 

 of the ' Transactions ' of the Academy of Sciences of Amsterdam ; 

 and the whole is also published separately*. After describing 

 the discovery (which appears to have been purchased, in 1758, 

 from the library of Prof. E. J. van Wachendorff), he gives an 

 abstract of the history of the species, and then considers the 

 derivation of its various names. "Dodo," he thinks, with Sir 

 Thomas Herbert, is undoubtedly of Portuguese oi-igin, contrary to 

 the opinion of Strickland. The next matter for consideration is 

 the artist by whom the newly-discovered figure was drawn ; and 

 the author identifies him with one Adriaan Pieterzoon van de 

 Venne, who was born at Delft in 1589, and died at the Hague in 

 1665, being principally known as the illustrator of the poems of 

 Jacob Cats. In addition to all this information, the singular 

 fact is extracted from the archives of the Dutch East-India Com- 

 pany that in 1647 the Governor of Batavia sent a live Dodo [een 

 doddaers vogel vanH Eyla7^dt Mauritius) to the Company^s Super- 

 intendent in Japan f. Finally, Heer Millies announces that a 

 hitherto unknown coloured representation of the bird, ascribed 

 to Pieter Holsteyn, exists now at Haarlem, in the collection of 

 Dr. A. van derWilligen, who, we regret to say, would not permit of 

 its being copied ; and also that there is a figure by the same artist 

 " in a bird-book," which the author, however, has not yet been 

 able to see. 



3. German. 

 Holland, though her navigators did much to bring the bird 

 to the notice of naturalists, is not allowed to stand alone in the 

 prosecution of Dodo-literature this year. In the January num- 



* Over eene nieuw ontdekte Afbeelding van den Dodo {Didus ineptus, 

 L.) door H. C. Millies. Amsterdam : 1868. 4to, pp. 20. 



t This old custom of sending live animals from the Dutch settlements 

 to Japan possibly may serve to explain the occurrence m a Japanese Ency- 

 clopsedia of the representation of a Struthious bird, which we lately noticed 

 [antea, p. 341). 



