1868.] 



Osteology of the Solitaire. 



433 



own special form of Solitaire, as the islands composing New Zealand have 

 their peculiar species of Apteryx. 



But it is only in such a case as has just been imagined that considerable 

 modifications would be likely to be effected. It therefore seems to be no 

 argument against the existence of such a process as that of *• Natural Selec- 

 tion," to find a small oceanic island tenanted by a single species which was 

 subject to great individual variability. Indeed a believer in this theory would 

 be inclined to predicate tliat it would be just under such circumstances 

 that the greatest amount of variability would be certain to occur. In its 

 original state, attacked by no enemies, the increase of the species would only 

 be dependent on the supply of food, which, one year with another, would 

 not vary much, and the form would continue without any predisposing cause 

 to change, and thus no advantage would be taken of the variability of struc- 

 ture presented by its individuals. 



On the other hand, we may reflect on what certainly has taken place. Of 

 the other terrestrial members of the avifauna of Rodriguez but few now 

 remain. A small Finch and a Warbler, both endemic (the first belonging 

 to a group almost entirely confined to Madagascar and its satellites, the 

 second to a genus extending from Africa to Australia), are the only two 

 land-birds of its original fauna now known to exist. The Guinea-fowl and 

 Love-bird have in all probability been introduced from Madagascar ; but 

 the Parrots and Pigeons of which Leguat speaks have vanished. The re- 

 mains of one of the first, and the description of the last, leave little room 

 to doubt but they also were closely allied to the forms found in Madagascar 

 and the other Mascarene islands ; and thus it is certainly clear that four 

 out of the six indigenous species had their natural allies in other spe- 

 cies belonging to. the same zoological province. It seems impossible on 

 any other reasonable supposition than that of a common ancestry to 

 account for this fact. The authors are compelled to the belief that there 

 was once a time when Rodriguez, Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, and 

 probably the Seychelles were connected by dry land, and that that time is 

 sufficiently remote to have permitted the descendants of the original inha- 

 bitants of this now submerged continent to become modified into the many 

 different representative forms which are now known. Whether this result 

 can have been effected by the process of Natural Selection " must remain 

 an open question; but that the Solitaire of Rodriguez, and the Dodo of 

 Mauritius, much as ihoij eventually came to differ, sprang from one and 

 the same parent stock, seems a deduction so obvious, that the authors can 

 no more conceive any one fully acquainted with the facts of the case 

 hesitating about its adoption than that he can doubt the existence of the 

 Power by whom thes." species were thus formed. 



