32 NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF DUBLIN. 



Porcupine. Dr. Cobbold, to whom Dr. Barker sent specimens, was kind 

 enough to assist him in naming it. It is one well known to occur in the 

 Hare and Rabbit;, and, as the Porcupine had been procured from the 

 Zoological Gardens, it might be thought that the nematoid in question had 

 migrated from its proper host to a kindred animal. But this view is very- 

 questionable, as in the record of the Tcenia pectinata, already alluded to 

 as having occurred in the Canadian Porcupine (a wild animal), it is 

 stated that the common hosts of the entozoa are the Rabbit, Hare, and 

 Marmot. The Oxijuris amligua were found in great abundance — Dr. 

 Barker was sure he counted sixty specimens — and, as usual in such cases, 

 the males were far fewer in number than the females, and were about 

 one-tenth their size. 



Dr. E. Perceval Wright, P. L. S., said, that having been entrusted 

 by Dr. Charles Henry Leet, of the 13th Light Infantry, with some bones 

 of that very rare and most interesting bird, the Dodo, he had asked and 

 obtained permission from Dr. Leet to exhibit these remains at a meeting 

 of this Society ; and he regretted that Dr. Leet's health did not permit 

 him to be present at the meeting this evening, to give those details in 

 reference to their discovery which his local knowledge of the Mauritius 

 would have enabled him to have done. Though this bird was common 

 enough in the Mauritius in the earlier portion of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury — so common that they used to be served out by a quarter of a hun- 

 dred at a time as fresh food to the sailors of Admiral Van Neck and Ad- 

 miral Schuurman's fleets — yet, as is well known, it has been for the 

 last two centuries extinct, and, with the exception of some beautiful 

 figures by Savary, and some rough woodcuts illustrating some of the jour- 

 nals of the Dutch voyagers, and a few specimens of the head and foot 

 preserved as sacred relics in one or two European museums, nought re- 

 mains beside verbal evidence to tell us that it ever existed; so speedily, even 

 within comparatively recent times, may a species, unfitted for a change 

 in the struggle for its existence, disappear. Prom the head of the Dodo, 

 preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Professor Owen seems to have con- 

 sidered it probable that it belonged to an extremely modified form of the 

 Raptores, and at another time he referred it to the Cursores. Rein- 

 hardt, however, from the examination of a mutilated cranium in the Got- 

 torf Museum, assigned this strange grotesque bird, of about fifty pounds 

 in weight, unable to fly /and with a skull greater than that of any exist- 

 ing bird of prey, to the family which contains the turtle doves and wood 

 pigeons. Strickland and Melville, in that most interesting work, 

 "The Dodo and its Kindred," confirm this opinion; and especially 

 Professor Melville, who, in his elaborate anatomical account of the 

 Oxford specimen — an account which is quite a model for such kind of 

 work, both for its conscientious accuracy and minute detail — finally 

 settles the resting place of this bird, as Bernhardt had done, among the 

 Columbidse. Didus meptus, or the Dodo, was apparently found in the 

 Mauritius, D. soliiarius in Rodriguez. A. collection of bones, how- 

 ever, presented by Mr. Telfair to the Zoological Society of London in 



