193 
the earth. Notwithstanding the general and diligent search for 
it, and the considerable rewards offered, not a vestige has since 
been discovered of this animal; man has destroyed it; a jaw and 
a skull-fragment preserved in the Petersburg Museum are the 
only relics left us , and but for the description of the zoologist 
Steller who was shipwrecked on the coast of Kamshatka, we should 
be utterly in the dark as to the animal in question. 1 But if we 
were to ask the seal-hunters and whale-fishers on those coasts, 
they would certainly reply that they had never heard of such an 
animal. 
Almost as quickly was the Dronte or Dodo exterminated. The 
sailors of the Dutch Admiral Wybrand of Warwyck, whose vessel 
was stranded upon the coast of Mauritius, in 1598, commenced the 
war of extermination. Although they wore utterly disgusted with 
the meat, — they, therefore, called those birds Walgh-birds, i. e. 
loathsome birds, — and although the whole crow, half-famished 
as they were, could not consume over two birds at one meal, yet 
the stupid, clumsy creatures were killed by scores. Already in 1607, 
ihe merchant Paulus van Soldt reported that the number of those 
birds was greatly decreasing on the coast; his crew also, subsisted 
for 23 days on nothing but drontes and some few tortoises. In 
1681 the bird is mentioned for the last time, and the researches 
instituted on the spot by Bory St. Vincent in tbe beginning of the 
present century have shown, that upon that island the memory of 
those marvellous birds had entirely disappeared even from tra- 
dition. 
Nor is it to be doubted, that the extermination of the gigantic 
birds of New Zealand was chiefly accomplished by the hand of 
man. In briefly retracing the past to the times when New Zea- 
land was not yet trodden by the foot of man, we must assume, 
that at that time the large Dinornis and Apteryx species, whose 
bones we find to-day, lived in great numbers upon open fern-land, 
subsisting on the roots of Pteris esculenta. Dr. J. Haast notices 
1 But very recently, — a year or two ago, — some more complete remains 
were exhumed. 
llochstetter, New Zealand. 
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