ORDER GRALL^. 4<45 



that it has large black eyes, mandibles, the aperture of which 

 is very ample, a curved neck, and a body so clumsy and fat, 

 that its walk is very heavy. 



The description of Willoughby differs but little from that 

 of Clusius and Bontius ; but he adds, that he himself beheld 

 the spoils of this bird in the museum of Sir John Trades - 

 caut. 



Herbert, in his travels, tells us, that the dodo weighed at 

 least fifty pounds, and that the stomach was hot enough to 

 digest stones. The weight would appear to be exaggerated, 

 and the pretended faculty of digesting stones is utterly in- 

 admissible. 



The figure of the dodo, found in " Edwards's Gleanings," 

 was copied from a drawing made at the Mauritius from a 

 livinof individual. This figure has served as a model for all 

 others, and particularly for those given by Dr. Latham, by 

 Blumenbach, and by Shaw. The last writer, having re- 

 marked some relations between the bill of the dodo and that 

 of the albatross, inquires, whether an inaccurate representation, 

 done by a sailor, might not have given rise to the supposition 

 of a new genus ; but when he considers what excessive neg- 

 ligence it would be in any painter to represent a web-footed 

 bird with cleft and separated toes, and to substitute simple 

 winglets for wings of considerable extent, he dismisses this 

 conjecture as of little weight. The same naturalist being 

 determined to continue his researches, in consequence of the 

 assertions of Charleton, who, in his Onomasticon Zdicon, 

 affirms that the bill and head of the dodo were then in the 

 Museum of the Royal Society, and of Grew, who mentions 

 the leg of one of these birds among the curiosities of the 

 British Museum, found the leg in question at the Museum, 

 and another leg, with the bill and part of the cranium, in the 

 Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, to which all the curious 

 objects in that of Tradescaut had been transferred. These 



