361 
FEATHERED FORMS OF OTHER DAYS. 
The island of Mauritius was rather 
noted for its flightless birds, largely due, 
no doubt, to the fact that so few disturbing 
elements were present to molest them, as 
man and such of the mammalia as prey 
upon birds. It followed as a natural 
sequence, then, that those birds, whose 
native instincts rather inclined them to 
seek the ground as the more frequent place 
of resort, having on that island compara- 
tively little use for their wings, if they 
really originally possessed them, these 
members in time gradually atrophied and 
became rudimentary. So, as we might be 
led to expect, as a consequence the dodo 
was not the only victim in these islands, 
of his kind, that succumbed to civiliza- 
tion’s onward march ; nor are we disap- 
pointed in our conjecture, for not only its 
little sister isle of Bourbon, but the more 
remote island of Rodriguez, lying off far 
to the eastward, have both afforded re- 
mains of birds that are now extinct, and 
very remarkable and interesting forms 
they were too. 
When the writer some two years ago 
was engaged in rearranging the material 
that went to make up the section of avian 
osteology at the Smithsonian Institution, 
he had the good fortune to find, in ad- 
dition to such treasures as some of the 
material Darwin had used in demonstrat- 
ing some anatomical facts in one of his 
great works, and some fossils from Pro- 
fessor Alphonse Milne-Edwards, from the 
Paris Basin, a fairly well-preserved lot of 
remains of the now extinct solitaire. This 
was one of the members of the Rodriguez 
avifauna , and the only good account we 
have in our possession of him is by the 
Huguenot exile, Monsieur Leguat, who 
spent two years on that island towards the 
close of the seventeenth century. The 
solitaire was a taller, trimmer, though heav- 
ier bird than its more rotund and related 
ally, the dodo of Mauritius. Leguat’s ac- 
count is said to be a very accurate one, 
and delightful reading, but his figure of 
the bird that accompanies it is a woful 
attempt at art, and grotesque in the 
extreme. 
Several species of parrots, doves, an 
owl, a peculiar starling, all among the land- 
birds, and several interesting water-birds " the giant rail of Mauritius. 
1 1,1 • 1 1 r (FROM A DRAWING BY R. W. SHUFELDT.) 
have now completely vanished from one 
or the other of this group of islands. Their must introduce the “giant” (Leguatia gigatt- 
avifauntz have indeed suffered since man made iea ) of Mauritius. This great rail-like bird 
his appearance among them, and the forces was more than six feet high, and no doubt 
of civilization have been brought into play. was found on the island about the same time 
Before bidding final adieu to the Mascarenes as the dodo. With these extraordinary forms 
and the shades of their departed bird-life, we was associated another wingless bird, allied 
Vol. XXXT. — 36. 
