356 APPENDIX. 



Madagascar, and the other Mascarene islands ; and thvis it is 

 certainly clear that fo^ir out of sbi indigenous species had their 

 natural allies in other species belonging to the same zoological 

 province. It seems impossible, on any other reasonable suppo- 

 sition than that of a common ancestry, to account for this fact." 

 The authors are compelled to the belief that there was once a 

 time when Rodriguez, Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, and the 

 Seychelles were connected by dry land, and that that time is 

 sufficiently remote to have permitted the descendants of the 

 original inhabitants of this now submerged continent to become 

 modified into the many representative forms which are now 

 known. Whether this result can have been effected by the 

 process of " natural selection" must remain an open question ; 

 but that the Solitaire of Rodriguez and the Dodo of Mauritius, 

 much as they eventually came to differ, sprang from one and the 

 same stock, seems a deduction so obvious, that the authors can 

 no more conceive any one, fully acquainted with the facts of the 

 case, hesitating about its adoption than that he can doubt the 

 existence of the Power by whom these species were thus formed. 



" We are not aware", write MM. E. Newton and Clark, "that 

 the osteology of any vertebrate, other than man, has been studied 

 with the same wealth of materials as that of the Solitaire."^ 



As soon as Rodriguez had been selected as a transit station in 

 1874, it was suggested that a thorough examination of the caves 

 should be initiated, in the hope of obtaining skeletons of Pezo- 

 'phrvps. Mr. Slater, one of the naturalists of the expedition, 

 deputed for the pm-pose,- accordingly examined the caves in the 

 tract of coralline limestone overlying the basalt rock on the south- 

 west side of the island. In these caves was found a deposit of 

 earth, varying from six inches to three feet in depth — in some 

 places even to nine feet ; but, as a rule, no bones were found below 

 two feet. 



Mr. Slater supposes that the Solitaire resorted to the caverns 



1 See also Proceedings Zool. Soc, 1874, p. 474, and Art. " Fossil 

 Birds", in Encyclopedia Britannica, by Professor A. Newton. 



2 Bee Introduction. 



