542 
puesident’s address. 
practice of burning large tracts of forest and other growth, for 
the purpose of preparing the ground for artificial cultivation. 
Here I can speak from experience, as I have learnt to know their 
effect in a distant part of the world, where I have spent some 
fifteen years of my life. You are doubtless aware that a very large 
proportion of the species of birds which were not only indigenous, 
but peculiar, to the Island of Mauritius has ceased to exist; and 
the same is to be said of those of two other islands — one. Bourbon, 
now called La Eeunion, its near neighbour, and another, Eodrigues, 
lying some three hundred miles to the eastward, but with an 
avi-fauna from the same original stock. These three together are 
commonly spoken of as the Mascarene Islands, from the old 
Portuguese navigator, Mascaregnas, who discovered two, at least, 
of them. Ho complete list of the existing and extinct species of 
birds of these islands has ever been made, and I therefore propose 
to add one to these remarks, which, with the assistance of my 
brother. Professor Newton, I have drawn up, thinking thereby 
some service may be done to the study of ornithology by furnishing 
in a compendious form a considerable amount of information not 
easily obtained. To make the list the more useful, I have 
included in it the species of birds known to exist in the Seychelles 
archipelago — a group of islands lying, it is true, about nine hundred 
miles to the northward of the other three islands — but forming un- 
doubtedly a part of the same fauna, which in its turn is subsidiary 
to tliat of Madagascar. 
We have undeniable and, in some instances, abundant evidence 
that each of the three islands which form the Mascarene group 
has lost several of its indigenous species, notably the Dodo, 
Solitaire, and other species with limited powers of flight, and as 
these species were most assuredly peculiar to these islands, i.e. 
did not exist elsewhere, the result is that they have become 
extinct. 
The extinction of the more or less flightless birds was however 
complete more than a century ago, and was probably to a groat 
extent due to the introduction of foreign mammals, Pigs, and 
Monkeys, a practice which, though it may have originated with the 
