456 



EXTINCTION OF SPECIES. 



[Ch. XLII. 



of various parts of our island, in flocks of forty or fifty birds • 

 whereas it is now (1821) a circumstance of rare occurrence 

 to meet with a single individual,' Bewick nl«r. 



remar 



more common 



at present ; they are now found only in the oi3en counties of 

 the south and east -in the plains of Wiltshire, Dorsetshire 



and some parts of Yorkshire. '•^' 



In the few years that have 



elapsed since Bewick wrote, this bird has entirely disappeared 



from the British Isles. 



may 



emor 



the larger and more conspicuous animals inhabiting a small 

 spot on the globe ; but they cannot fail to exalt our conception 

 of the enormous revolutions which, in the course of thousands 

 of years, the whole human species must have efiPected. 



Extinction of the doclo.~The kangaroo and the emu are 



retreating rapidly before 



the progress of colonisation 



Australia ; and it scarcely admits of doubt, that the general 

 cultivation of that country must lead to the extirpation of both. 

 The most striking example of the loss, even within the last two 

 centuries, of a remarkable species, is that of the dodo— a bird 

 first seen by the Dutch, when they landed on the Isle of France, 

 at that time uninhabited, immediately after the discovery of 



Hope 



It 



was of a large size, and singular form ; its wings short, hke 

 those of an ostrich, and wholly incapable of sustaining its 

 heavy body, even for a short flight. In its general appearance 

 it differed from the ostrich, cassowary, or any known bird.f 



Many naturalists gave figures of the dodo after the com- 

 mencement of the seventeenth century; and there 

 painting of it in the British Museum, which is said to have 

 been taken from a living individual. Beneath the painting 



is a 



* Land Eirds, vol. i. p. 316, ed. 1821. 



University of Oxford, the exact day and 



_ t Some have comphiined that inscrip- year when the remains of the last speci- 



tions on tomb-stones convey no general men of the dodo, whicli had Leen per- 



information, except that individuals were mitted to rot in the Ashmolean Museum, 



born and died, accidents which nuist were ca.^t away. The relics, we are told, 



happen alike to all men. But the death were ' a musajo snbducta, annuente vice- 



of a species is so remarkable an event in cancellario aliisque curatoribus, ad ea 



natural history that it deserves comme- histranda convocatis, die Januarii Svo, 



moration, and it is with no small interest a.d. 1755.' Zool. Joiirn. No. 12, p. 559. 



that we learn, from the archives of the 1828. 





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