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ardour of naturalists led them to inquiry and careful search, but the Wald-vogel and 
Dod-aarse of the old Dutch voyagers had ceased to exist. 
The general fidelity of the ancient Dutch paintings of the Dodo, and of their having 
been actually taken from a living bird, was, however, doubted; and even as late as 
1830, some modern ornithologists deemed the association of the head and feet to be 
strange and improbable. I was induced, in view of this and some other zoological 
questions, to visit Holland in the summer of 1838. 
Being struck with the minuteness and accuracy with which the exotic species of 
animals had been depicted by Savery and Breughel in their favourite subjects, which 
gave them scope for grouping together a great variety of animals, and knowing that the 
celebrated menagerie of the contemporary Stadtholder, Prince Maurice, had afforded 
the living models to these artists, I sat down before Savery’s ‘Orpheus and the Beasts, 
in the Museum at the Hague, to make a list of the species which the picture sufficiently 
evinced that the artist had had the opportunity of studying alive. In one corner of 
this picture is a beautifully finished figure of the Dodo, which, though but three inches 
long, shows the auricular circle of feathers, the scutation of the tarsi, and the loose 
structure of the caudal plumes. In the general configuration and characters of the 
head and body, and in the number, position, and proportions of the toes, this beautiful 
miniature accords with the full-sized oil-painting of the Dodo in the Ashmolean Museum 
at Oxford, attributed to Savery, and also with the well-known oil-painting’ in the 
British Museum ; the disposition of the epidermal scutes, reticulate upon the metatarse, 
in a row of broad scutes on the upper surface of the toes, accords with that shown in 
the dried foot attributed to the Dodo in the British Museum. This removed all doubt 
in my mind of the fidelity of the paintings above cited, and I redoubled my endeayours 
to stimulate residents in the Mauritius to search for and obtain bones of the Dodo. 
Twenty-eight years elapsed before this desire was fulfilled. In the meanwhile the 
happy perception by Professor J. Reinhardt, in 1843, of the resemblance of the beak of 
the Dodo to that of certain tropical Doves, forming Cuvier’s genus Vinago, characterized 
by their proportionally larger, more strongly arched and compressed beak than in other 
Pigeons, and the still closer resemblance in miniature of the beak of an allied Dove 
from the Samoan Islands (which resemblance led Mr. Peale, in 1848, to assign it to a 
genus Diduncu/lus), directed the osteologist. to the family in which the most instructive 
comparisons with the remnants of the Dodo then accessible could be made. 
The results of these comparisons with the bones of the head and foot exposed in or 
extracted from the Ashmolean specimens were given in the beautiful work by Strickland 
and Melville, entitled ‘ Dodo and its Kindred,’ 4to, 1848. 
* Edwards says of this painting: “The original picture was drawn in Holland from the living bird, brought 
trom St. Maurice's Island, in the Hast Indies, in the early times of the discovery of the Indies by the way of the 
Cape of Good Hope, It was the property of the late Sir Hans Sloane to the time of his death; and afterwards 
becoming my property I deposited it in the British Museum as a great curiosity.” 
