558 Mr. Duncan on the Dodo. 



extending to the beak, the curved and swelling neck, the lumpish 

 body, short wings, short thick legs and divided claws, &c., &c., 

 are common to all, together with the singular tuft of rump feathers. 

 As the two latest are manifestly not cojiies from the earliest, nor 

 the third fronn the second, the undesignedness of their agreement 

 (to borrow a phrase from a well known and matchless argument of 

 Paley,) is a strong evidence that they are not forgeries. 



'J'he hooded character of the heads corresponds with the head 

 preserved entire in the Ashmolean Museum ; and the legs suf- 

 ficiently resemble that in the British Museum, and that, more 

 decayed, io the Ashmolean. 



The bird depicted in these figures appears to differ from any 

 duly classified, from actual knowledge of its characters, by any of 

 our best naturalists, although noticed by all of them. It may be 

 placed however near the Emeu in Cuvier's ranks of GallincB.* 



* The following remarks on the station in nature of the Dodo are given in 

 a paper entitled, " Observations on the natural affinities that connect the 

 orders and families of Birds," published in the Transactions of the Linnean 

 Society, vol. xiv. p. 484. 



" Considerable doubts have arisen as to the present existence of the Linnean 

 Didus; and they have been increased by the consideration of the numberless 

 opportunities that have latterly occurred of ascertaining the existence of these 

 birds in those situations, the Isles of Mauritius and Bourbon, v/here they were 

 originally alleged to have been found. That they once existed I believe cannot 

 be questioned. Besides the descriptions given by voyagers of undoubted au- 

 thority, the relics of a specimen preserved in the public repository of this 

 country, bear decisive record of the fact. The most probable supposition 

 that we can form on the subject is, that tlie race has become extinct in the 

 before-mentioned islands, in consequence of the value of the bird as an article 

 of food to the earlier settlers, and its incapability of escaping from pursuit. 

 This conjecture is strengthened by the consideration of the gradual decrease of 

 a nearly conterminous group, the Otis tarda of our British ornithology, which, 

 from similar causes, we have every reason to suspect will shortly be lost to 

 this country. We may, however, still entertain some hopes that the Didus may 

 be recovered in the south-eastern part of that vast continent, hitherto so little 

 explored, which adjoins those islands, and whence, indeed, it seems to have 

 been originally imported into them. I dwell upon these circumstances with 

 more particularity, as the disappearance of this group gives us some grounds 

 for asserting, that many chasms which occur in the chain of affinities through- 

 out nature may be accounted for on the supposition of a similar extinction of a 



