1877.] The Giant Birds of New Zealand. 21 
While considering the extinct birds of New Zealand, it may 
not be uninteresting to our readers to turn their attention briefly 
to the island of Mauritius, the home of the dodo, which is situ- 
ated about a thousand miles eastward of the coast of Africa, and 
together with its associated islands presents many features anal- 
ogous to the life of New Zealand. The Dutch navigators, while 
making their earlier voyages to the Indies by the new passage 
around the Cape of Good Hope, found on this uninhabited island 
large numbers of the clumsy, wingless birds that have received 
the name of the dodo. This bird which was related in structure 
to the pigeons, was of about fifty pounds in weight; being totally 
incapable of flight and very clumsy, it fell an easy victim to the 
sailors, who killed it in great numbers. Owing to the persecu- 
tion of man and also, probably, to the depredations of the ani- 
mals that accompanied him, the dodo soon became exterminated. 
The only records of its existence which remain are a few of 
its bones, and the rude drawings and descriptions in the books of 
the Dutch navigators, together with two or three pictures sup- 
posed to have been painted from life. The dodo furnishes the 
best-known example of the extermination of a species through 
the agency of man. : 
Those who would place the extinction of the moa so far in 
the past will do well to consider the case of the dodo, that, as 
we have seen, abounded on its native island scarcely two cent- 
uries ago, but of which we now know but little more than we do 
of the moa. 
Madagascar, also, had its huge wingless bird, the Æpyornis, 
that equaled or even exceeded in size the largest of the moas. 
On the island of Rodriguez another colossal bird, the solitaire, 
was found, which, like the dodo, has been exterminated by man, 
and the same fate has befallen other allied birds on the Isle of 
Bourbon. 
It is remarkable that all these huge wingless birds, including 
also the ostrich and the rhea, are confined to the southern hemi- 
sphere, and still more strange that so many of the largest and 
most interesting of them should be found only on the widely- 
separated islands of the Indian and Pacifie oceans. When and 
how they came to those isolated islands, or from what ancient 
forms of life derived, can only be known when the caves and 
recent rock formations of those islands shall have been explored, 
_ and the fragments of the ancient history of these beings de- 
~ Giphered and translated by the gaoioi, a 
