1352 The Zoologist— September, 186S. 



inferior to elephants in size, but are bulls in their nature, colour and 

 figure, nor do they spare man or beast vvhep once they have caught 

 sight of him. These, when trapped in pitfalls, the hunters unsparingly 

 kill. The youths, exercising themselves by this sort of hunting, are 

 hardened by the toil, and those among them who have killed most, 

 bringing with them the horns as testimonials, are given great praise. 

 But these Uri cannot be habituated to man, nor made tractable, not 

 even when taken young. The great size of the horns as well as the 

 form and quality of them differ much from those of our oxen."* 

 Now there is something extremely interesting in watching a methodical 

 comparative anatomist like Nilsson or Owen as he constructs a rumi- 

 nant of this enormous size from bones that have been discovered, and 

 then finds the creature of his skill tally exactly with an unquestionable 

 description from the life penned 1800 years previously. 



I am obliged to omit many species whose deaths succeeded that of 

 the Urus, and pass on to the date when modern Natural History may 

 be said to commence ; for between the date of Caesar and the narratives 

 of the early Dutch voyagers we have really no reliable accounts of 

 animals. But directly these early navigators commenced their career 

 the evidence is clear and decisive. 



3. The Dodo, a species that died about 1638. The dodo was 

 a bulky bird with a hooked beak, a bald head, very small wings and 

 very stout legs, that inhabited the island of Mauritius, where it was 

 discovered by Jacob von Neck, in 1598. In 1638 a living specimeu 

 was exhibited in London, and a stuffed specimen, in all probability 

 the skin of the same bird, was examined by three eminent naturalists, 

 — Tradescant in 1656; Willughby and Lloyd in 1684; and by a Mr. 

 Hyde in 1700: this invaluable relic of a dead species passed into the 

 possession of Oxford University, and with the exception of the head 

 and feet, now in the British Museum, was destroyed by order of the 

 authorities in 1755. We have no subsequent account of the living 

 bird, but abundance of its bones have been found in the island where 

 it was first discovered. 



4. The Solitary, a species of bird that died about 1700. The 

 solitary or solitaire (Pezophaps solitarius) was an apterous bird dis- 

 covered in 1691 by Francis Leguat in the Island of Rodiguez : it was 

 described with the utmost minuteness in the accouut of Leguat's 

 voyages published in English in 1708, and in French in 1720; but 



* The translation is quoted from Gosse, 'Romance of Natural History,' ii. 64. 



