99 
Over the door adjoining the Twelfth Room, is an ROOM XIII. 
original painting of the Dodo, presented to the Museum Nat Hist, 
by George Edwards, Esq., the celebrated ornitholo¬ 
gical artist, and copied in his works, plate No. 294, 
who says it was “drawn in Holland, from a living 
bird brought from St. Maurice’s Island in the East 
Indies.” The only remains of this bird at present 
known are a foot (Case, n. 65) in this collection, (pre¬ 
sented by the Royal Society,) and a head and foot of 
a smaller size, said to have belonged to a specimen 
which was formerly in Tradescant’s Museum, but now 
in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. The bird, in 
the shortness of the wings, resembles the ostrich, 
but its foot, in general, rather resembles that of the 
common fowl, and the beak, from the position of its 
nostrils, is most nearly allied to the Vultures; so that 
its true place in the series of birds, if indeed such a bird 
ever really existed, is as yet not satisfactorily determined. 
LONG GALLERY. 
The Long Gallery above the King’s Library is ap- LONG 
propriated to the collections of Mineralogy and Geo- T __ 
logy, including Secondary Fossils *, the arrangement of Nat * Hist. 
the 
* Two upright glazed cases, at each side of the door of entrance 
from the Thirteenth room, are now fitted up for the Class Reptilia, 
comprising Organic remains of the Chelonian, the Saurian, and the 
Batracliian Orders. The more striking objects here deposited belong 
to the second of those natural orders, which is divided into the fami¬ 
lies of the Crocodiles and the Iguanas, among the specimens of which 
the following may be specified :—a gavial of the lias at Monheim in 
Francouia, being the unique specimen described and figured by 
Soenmierring in the Memoirs of the Academy of Munich, under the 
name of Crocodiles priscus ;—the head and other parts of the Geo- 
saurus (the Lacerta gigantea of Soemmerring) found together with 
the preceding, and first described and figured by the last mentioned 
naturalist in the Transactions of the same Academy;—the lower jaw 
and other parts of the cranium, vertebrae, &c., of the huge reptile 
(Mososacrus S. Petri) from the St. Peter’s Mountain near Maes- 
H 2 tricht, 
