INTEODIJCTION. 
3 
years they lived almost exclusively on fish and Land- and Marine Tortoises, And again, 
on p. 338, the veriter says: — "L'isle abondoit autrefois en tortues de terre, mais les 
matelots en ont tant detruit, qu'on n'en trouve plus guere que sur la cote occidentale, 
encore y sont-elles tres-rares. On attribue a ces animaux plusieurs proprietes, entr' 
autres celle de purifier la masse du sang ; et de guerir des maladies. . . . On en tire 
encore une huile fort douce, qui a presque le meme gout que I'huile de Provence " 
(which statements are repeated in Rees's ' Cyclopsedia,' p. 207). 
Independent but similar evidence is given by Francois Gauche in " Relation du Voyage 
a Madagascar" (1638), published in ' Relations veritables et curieuses,' Paris, 1651, 4to, 
p. 7. "De la [de l'isle de Diego Rois *] nous tirasmes en l'isle de Mascarhene, qui en 
est eloignee de 30. lieues, scituee environ deux degrez dela le Tropique du Capricorne. 
. . . Elle est inhabitee [uninhabited] comme la precedente, quoy que les eaux y soient 
bonnes, abondante en gibier, poissons et fruit. On y voit grand nombre d'oiseaux, et 
tortues de terre, et les rivieres y sont fort pisqueuses." 
Finally I may refer to another testimony in the xvi. Recueil of the ' Lettres edi- 
fiantes,' &c. quoted above (Paris, 1724, 12mo), in a " Lettre du Pere Jacques," p. 9. " Le 
meilleur de tons les animaux, qu'on y [in Reunion] trouve, soit pour le gout, soit pour 
la sante, c'est la Tortue de terre. ... La Tortue est de la meme figure que celle, 
qu'on voit en France ; mais elle est bien difierente pour sa grandeur. On assure quelle 
vit un temps prodigieux, qu'il lui faut plusieurs siecles pour parvenir a la grosseur 
naturelle, et qu'elle pent passer plus de six mois sans manger. On en a garde dans 
l'isle de petites qui au bout de 20 ans n'avaient grossi que de quelques pouces," &c. 
As mentioned above, nothing else is known of this Tortoise : no specimen is known 
to have been preserved ; no remains have been found hitherto. It seems to have been 
exterminated even before the period of extinction of the Mauritius and Rodriguez 
species. The Seychelles do not appear to have been inhabited by these animals, cer- 
tainly not within historical times, all the individuals found there having been imported 
from Aldabra, and kept in a semi-domesticated condition. The latter group of islands 
is the only spot in the Indian Ocean where this Chelonian type still lingers in a wild 
state, in small and gradually diminishing numbers, as we shall subsequently see in the 
description of the Tortoises of that locality. 
The original condition and the fate of the Tortoises of the Galapagos archipelago 
were precisely the same as in the islands of the Indian Ocean. According to the 
unanimous testimony of geographers, the first discoverers of those islands, the Spaniards, 
found them so thickly peopled with Tortoises, that they applied the Spanish word for 
Tortoise to their discovery. In Dampiee's time (1680) it was the common practice of 
vessels to visit those islands for a supply of water and tortoises. In his ' New Voyage 
round the AVorld' (Lond. 1697, 8vo), p. 101, he says: — "The Land-Turtle are here so 
numerous that five or six hundred men might subsist on them alone for several months, 
* This does not appear to me to have been Rodriguez, as believed by the editor of the voyage. 
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