56 The Dodo and its Kindred. 



neglect of two hundred years. In many cases there exist better 

 data for determining a species which perished ages ago by geo- 

 logical causes, than in the case of a group of birds, several spe- 

 cies of which were living in the reign of Charles the first of 

 England. 



Historical notices of the Dodo. — This strange abnormal bird, 

 according to undoubted evidence, formerly existed in great num- 

 bers in the Isle of Mauritius. The evidence is historical, picto- 

 rial and real. 



^ i it is asserted that Mauritius was discovered early in 

 the sixteenth century, nothing definite was known of it until the 

 close of that century, when the Dutch navigator Van Neck took 

 possession of it, as it was uninhabited, and called it Mauritius. 



The author has copied a quaint old print of Van Neck, exhib- 

 iting the ship's company reveling in the virgin profusion of the 

 island. Birds, fishes, fruits, tortoises, bats and paroquets, among 

 animals, and Dates and other Palm trees among plants, with the 

 men at their labors, are all exhibited in a grotesque form, anima- 

 ted and graphic, but with wild violations of proportion and 

 perspective. 



Clusius, a Dutch writer — 1605 — gives a figure of the Dodo, and 

 states that stones an inch in length were found in the gizzards of 

 this bird, which were as large as in the swan but very different 

 in form. 



In 1602, Admiral Schuurmans staid some time at Mauritius, 

 and frequently mentions the Dod-aarsen or Dodos, on which the 

 seamen reveled — three or four of these birds, and in one instance 

 two, weighing probably fifty pounds each, having furnished an 

 abundant meal for a ship's crew. They are described as having 

 great heads with hoods thereon, with round sterns, without wings 

 or tail, and with only winglets on their sides and four or five 

 feathers behind; and as carrying commonly in the stomach a 

 stone the size of a fist. The sailors sometimes caught fifty birds 

 in a day, half of which were Dodos. Their historian has re- 

 corded their doings in homely verse, which is thus "Englished" 

 by our author* 



u For food the seamen hunt the flesh of feathered fowl, 



They tap the P;ilms, the round sterned Dodos they destroy, 

 The Parrot's life ihejr spare that he may scream and howl 

 And thus his fellows to imprisonment decoy." 



In 1605, Clusius saw at Leyden a Dodo's leg ; the tarsus over 

 four inches long and nearly four in circumference, covered with 

 thick yellowish scales. The toes were about two inches and 

 the nails about one inch long. 



The birds are mentioned again at Mauritius in 1606 by Corne- 

 lius Matelief, a Dutch admiral, and in 1607 the crews of Van der 

 Hagen feasted on Dodars and other game, and they salted Dodars 

 and tortoises for consumption on the voyage. 



