352 APPENDIX. 



up a small rivulet with steep sides, the water in which was 

 brackish and quite undrinkable by itself, and amid a grove of 

 thick fan-palms. Here I saw the only forest trees I came across ; 

 they were hois cVolive, and perhaps sixty or seventy feet high, 

 and three or four in circumference at six feet from the ground. 

 I picked up a shell or two of a land-tortoise and two bones. . . ." 

 Mr. Newton heard of a Serin, a Bengali, and a Dove. There were 

 certainly no hawks, or "merles," or swallows. Of sea birds there 

 were Noddies and Sooty Terns, Shearwaters, Boobies, and Frigate- 

 birds. Wild Guinea-fowls were common. " Of Dodo's remains, no 

 one knew anything more than that — ' long temps passi, di monde, 

 11 'a pas coune qui, fin vini rode pour li' — which, being inter- 

 preted, means ' in long time ago, someone, I know not who, came 

 and looked for it' — and this was all the information that could be 

 got." 



Notice of a Memoir on the Osteology of the Solitaire, or Didine 

 Bird of the Island of Rodrig^cez, hy Professor Alfred Newton, 

 F.B.S., and Mr. Edward Newton, M.A., Auditor-General of 

 Mauritius. (Proceedings of the Boyal Society, No. 103, jj. 

 428 ; 1868.) 

 " The Solitaire of Rodriguez was first satisfactorily shown to be 

 distinct from the Dodo of Mauritius (Didns ineptus) by Strickland, 

 in 184:4, from a renewed examination of the evidence respecting 

 it, consisting of the account given by Leguat in 1708, and of the 

 remains sent to France and Great Britain. Strickland, in 1848, 

 further proved it to be generically distinct from the Dodo. The 

 remains existing in Europe in 1852 were eighteen bones, of which 

 five were at Paris, six at Glasgow, five in possession of the Zoolo- 

 gical Society, and two in that of Strickland, who, at the 



date last mentioned, described them as belonging to two species, 

 the second of which he named Pezophaps minor, from the great 

 diff"erence observable in the size of the specimens. In 1864, Mr. 

 E. Newton^ visited Rodriguez, and there found in a cave two more 



1 One of the authors. 



