THE GIANT EXTINCT BIRDS OF THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE. 51 
establishing the fact of the male bird having a knob at the 
extremity of its rudimentary wing, which Leguat assures us it 
used as a means of defence ; in support of which assertion is the 
additional fact that some of the recovered rudimentary wing-bones 
which have this protuberance present indications of having been 
fractured and reunited during life. 
The two foregoing examples should, it was considered, teach 
us to deal tenderly with the accounts handed down to us by these 
gossiping old travellers, and that we should be slow to charge 
them with wilful deception, for we ought not to forget how largely 
the marvellous was commonly accepted by them. Assertions were 
received by them with but partial examination, and were retailed 
in thorough sincerity, the narrators evidently believing in their 
absolute truth. 
Mention was next made of the celebrated Dodo (Didus ineptus), 
of which until quite recently the few osseous fragments below 
enumerated were the only reputed remains. A head and foot in 
the Ashmolean at Oxford ; a leg in the British Museum ; a breast- 
bone in Paris ; a skull in Prague ; and a beak and skull in 
Copenhagen. After reviewing the history of the British Museum 
and Oxford relics, and other evidence of a pictorial nature, notice 
of this bird was concluded with mention of the important discovery 
of Dodo's bones by Mr. George Clarke of Mauritius in 1865, 
of which an interesting account was shortly after sent by him to 
the Ibis. The result of an examination of the most perfect set of 
these bones by Professor Owen, appeared in a paper in Proceedings 
of Zoological Society, for 1866, by which the most wonderful 
organization of the Dodo's skeleton is abundantly confirmed, and 
its columbine affinities, originally suggested by Professor Eeinhardt 
and Mr. Hugh Strickland, are established. 
The Dinornis, the gigantic Moa of New Zealand, was next 
noticed ; a bird which — unlike the Dodo and the Solitaire — had 
no contemporary pen to describe it ; for even had not Tasman been 
scared from the shores of Cook's Straits by the hostility of the 
Maories in 1642, it is questionable whether he would have been in 
time to have seen a living Moa, or to have feasted his crew on its 
flesh ; as we know about this same time the Dutch voyagers, to 
and from Batavia, feasted theirs on the helpless Dodos of Mauri- 
tius. But however this may be, it is pretty certain that the Moa 
must have succumbed to its fate long before Cook visited almost 
