’ Mr. H.#. Strickland on the Dodo and its Kindred. 137 
The story deuided into 5 or 6 parts, invented by Mr. Gos- 
ling, sometimes schollar to Mr. Camden, enginer, who BE- 
STOWED THE Dopar (A BLACKE, INDIAN. BIRD) VRON. Y° 
Anatomy scnoo.e. His wife dying left him some meanes 
in a chest, w“? a maide seruant cunningly getting y® key of 
her master, conveyed away, and soe he now glad to get his 
. liuinge by vseing his wits for such inventions.” 
How Mr. Gosling obtained his “ Dodar,” or what subsequently 
became of it, we have not a particle of evidence. The contents, 
and even the locality, of “ y® Anatomy schoole ” of 1634 are alike 
unknown, the. existing Anatomy school having been founded 
about 1750, independently of any previous establishment. One 
thing is certain, that this “ Dodar ” was not the same individual 
as the one which subsequently formed one of the treasures of the 
Ashmolean Museum, which was “ordered to be removed ” in 
1755, and whose head and foot are fortunately still in existence. 
For we have the clearest evidence that the latter specimen was 
in Tradescant’s private collection at Lambeth in 1656, and was 
not transferred to Oxford till 1683 (see ‘ The Dodo and its Kin- 
_ dred,’ pp. 28, 82). Two Dodos have therefore existed, at suc- 
cessive periods, in the venerable repositories of Oxford University, 
where the naturalist from the remotest parts of Europe now 
makes the mouldering relics of one an object of pilgrimage. 
I may here mention, that the preservation of these relics is 
due not so much to Fortune as to old Ashmole himself. In his 
original regulations for the management of his museum, it is 
enacted that when any of the specimens were found to be in bad 
condition, they should not be wholly destroyed, but the hard 
parts, such as the heads and feet, should be put away in a closet ; 
and to this judicious proviso of the old astrologer we are pro- 
bably mdebted for the most important evidences now existing on 
the structure of the Dodo. 
2. Affinities of the Dodo.—I have received from that excellent 
osteologist, Mr. Thomas Allis of York, the following interesting 
communication, relating to a point in the anatomy of the Dodo 
which Dr. Melville and I had overlooked, but which wholly con- 
firms our conclusions. 
“On looking at plate ix* I immediately perceived strikingly 
confirmatory evidence of your views as to the Columbidine affi- 
nities of the Dodo, unnoticed either by thyself or by thy talented 
coadjutor, in his elaborate anatomical description of the head of 
that bird. This evidence consists in the number of the sclerotic 
plates. At the Zoological Section of the British Association at 
Liverpool I exhibited dissections of the sclerotic ring of about 
seventy birds; among the seventy there were three species of 
