Cu. I.] OF THE DODO. 21 
Sir T. Herbert also gives a figure of what he calls “ A Hen,” which is very probably 
intended for the same bird which accompanies the Dodo in Van den Broecke’s plate (svpra, p. 19). 
He alludes to ‘‘ Hens” among the other birds of Mauritius, but gives us no information by which 
wy 
they can now be identified. his bird is probably the same that is mentioned by Leguat, 
among other Mauritian birds, under the name of Ge/inottes. The “ Velt-hoenders” of Cornelisz 
(supra, p. 13), and the “ Fe/dhiner” of Verhutten (p. 18), may also refer to it. Compare also 
the words of Cauche: “Il y a en Visle Maurice et Madagascar... . . . des poules rouges, 
au bec de becasse ; pour les prendre il ne faut que leur presenter une piece de drap rouge, 
elles suivent et se laissent prendre a la main: elles sont de la grosseur de nos poules, excel- 
lentes a manger.’’—Cauche, Voyage, p. 132. 
10. Francois Cauche, in the account of his Voyage made im 1638, published m the 
‘Relations veritables et curieuses de I’Isle de Madagascar, Paris, 1651,’ says that he saw in 
Mauritius birds called Oiseaux de Nazaret, larger than a swan, covered with black down, with 
curled feathers on the rump, and similar ones in place of wings; that the beak was large 
and curved, the legs scaly, the nest made of herbs heaped together, that they lay but one egg 
the size of a halfpenny roll, and that the young ones have a stone in the gizzard. 
With a view of deducing the size of these eggs, I was contemplating an investigation of 
the prices of corn, the wages of labour, the honesty of bakers, and other elements, in hopes of 
determining the bulk of a “pain d’ un sol” in 1638, but I have fortunately been spared this 
enquiry by another passage of Cauche, where.he assigns the same dimensions to the egg of 
the Cape Pelican (Pelicanus onocrotalus), which may therefore be taken as an approximation to 
the size of the Dodo’s egg. There can be no doubt that the bird described by Cauche was 
the Dodo, although his account was probably composed from memory, or confused with the 
descriptions then current of the Cassowary ; for he tells us that it had only three toes on each 
foot, that the legs were of considerable length, and that the bird had no tongue, which latter 
character was at that time falsely attributed to the Cassowary. (See De Bry, part IV. pl. viii.) 
Out of this erroneous statement sprang up the “ Didus nazarenus,” a phantom-species, which 
has haunted our systems of ornithology from the days of Gmelin downwards. Cauche conjec- 
tures, and many authors repeat, that these birds derived their name from the island, or rather 
sand-bank, of Nazareth, to the north-east of Madagascar, but this idea is utterly unfounded. 
