MESSES. A. AND E. NEWTON ON THE OSTEOLOGY OE THE SOLITAIEE. 353 
animals have become extinct through the agency of man ; but in nearly all the cases the 
history of which is sufficiently well known to us, the extirpation has been caused less by 
his direct than by his indirect agency. The most noticeable exceptions to this rule are 
perhaps those of the Gare-fowl (Ale a impennis) * * * § and the Northern Manatee (Rhytina 
gigas). And while in the first of these the submersion of its chief remaining breeding- 
station, owing to a volcanic eruption (and, we may presume, an accompanying earthquake), 
unquestionably was not without its influence, it does seem as if man himself actually, 
though unintentionally, had destroyed these two species. But with the Solitaire of 
Rodriguez, as with the Dodo and many other animals, it seems to.us that there is no good 
ground for believing that they were pursued to the death of the race by man. It is far 
more likely that they succumbed to other forces set in motion indeed by him but 
without a thought of thereby accomplishing their destruction. It does not seem at all 
unreasonable to suppose that either or both might have survived for many years his direct 
attacks. They would doubtless have become more shy, and have retired to the most 
secluded parts of the islands they inhabited. They might even have acquired greater 
wariness, and been enabled in some manner to baffle his pursuit. But they had not to 
contend with man alone. ITe had allies fighting against them. In our own country we 
see that man has not, after many hundred years of incessant warfare, succeeded in extir- 
pating by direct action a single species of bird. Birds of prey still exist, and in some 
districts in not inconsiderable numbers, in spite of the war of extermination carried on 
against them. In those districts where their destruction has been most nearly accom- 
plished, it is because man has fought them with other weapons, more fatal because 
apparently more peaceful. It is to the plough and the draining-spade, with the changes 
that have followed their use over large areas, rather than to the gun or the gin that 
they have succumbed. The Crane and the Wild Goose have been banished from the 
English fens with the Harriers, and more species than we can here stay to enumerate 
by the simple act of bringing under cultivation by means of improved drainage the 
extensive tract of the “ Bedford Level.” The Bustard has yielded to the driver of the 
horse-hoe and the maker of plantationsf . These have gone from us without an idea 
that any such effects would follow the causes employed ; nay, they have gone from us, 
some of them, in spite of legal protection, and therefore against the will of man. Now, 
so far as we are able to judge, the Solitaire of Rodriguez has been subject to no dis- 
turbances of this kind. The island seems to bear now much the same appearance as it 
presented to the eyes of LeguatJ, and if the popular tradition be true that forests once 
existed in it which were destroyed some forty or fifty years ago by fire, it seems to be 
certain, from Grant’s silence in 1801 §, that there were then no Solitaires left to 
perish in the flames. Some other cause of extinction must therefore be sought, and it 
* Though it may still he premature to speak of this species as extinct, there can he no douht about its fate 
should a colony yet he discovered. (Of. Natural History Review, October 1865, pp. 467-488.) 
f Stevenson’s ‘ Birds of Norfolk,’ vol. ii. pp. 9-17. ± Ibis, 1865, p. 148. 
§ History of Mauritius and the Neighbouring Islands, pp. 100-145. 
MDCCCLX.IX. 3 B 
