The Romance of Natural History, Second Series

by Philip Henry Gosse

It is pretty certain that a living specimen was about the same time exhibited in England. Sir Hamon L'Estrange tells us distinctly that he saw it. His original MS. is preserved in the British Museum, and with some blanks caused by the injury of time, of no great consequence, reads as follows:—

"About 1638, as I walked London streets, I saw the picture of a strange fowl hong out upon a cloth. vas and myselfe with one or two more Gen. in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a greate fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky Cock and so legged and footed but stouter and thicker and of a more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a yong Cock Fesan and on the back of dunn or deare coulour. The keeper called it a Dodo and in the ende of a chimney in the chamber there lay an heap of large pebble stones whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as bigg as nutmegs and the keeper told us shee eats them conducing to digestion and though I remember not how farre the keeper was questioned therein yet I am confident that afterwards shee cast them all agayne."[63]

It is probable that this very specimen passed into the museum of Tradescant, who, in the Catalogue of "The Collection of Rarities preserved at Lambeth," dated 1656, mentions the following: "Dodar from the Island Mauritius: it is not able to flie being so bigg." Willoughby the ornithologist, a most unexceptionable testimony, says that he saw this specimen in Tradescant's museum: it is mentioned also by others;—as by Llhwyd in 1684, and by Hyde in 1700. It passed, with the rest of the Tradescant Collection, to Oxford, and thus became part of the Ashmolean Museum,—and being in a decayed condition, was ordered to be destroyed by the authorities, who had no apprehension of its value, in 1755. The skull and one foot, however, were preserved, and are still in the Museum at Oxford. Remains of the Dodo have been dug up in the Mauritius, and are in the Paris Museum, and in that of the Zoological Society of London. The bird certainly does not exist there now, nor in either of the neighbouring islands.

In the British Museum there is a fine original painting, once the property of George Edwards, the celebrated bird painter, representing the Dodo surrounded by other minor birds and reptiles. Edwards states that "it was drawn in Holland, from a living bird brought from St Maurice's Island, in the East Indies. It was the property of Sir Hans Sloane at the time of his death, and afterwards becoming my property, I deposited it in the British Museum as a great curiosity."

Professor Owen has discovered another original figure of this interesting form in Savary's painting of "Orpheus and the Beasts," at the Hague. The figure, though small, displays all the characteristic peculiarities, and agrees well with Edwards' painting, while evincing that it was copied from the living bird.

It is possible that there were two species of Dodo; which would explain certain discrepancies in the descriptions of observers. At all events we have here one, if not more, conspicuous animal absolutely extinguished within the last two hundred years.

Just about a century ago a great animal disappeared from the ocean, which, according to Owen, was contemporary with the fossil elephant and rhinoceros of Siberia and England. Steller, a Russian voyager and naturalist, discovered the creature, afterward called Stelleria by Cuvier, in Behring's Straits; a huge, unwieldy whale-like animal, one of the marine pachyderms, allied to the Manatee, but much larger, being twenty-five feet long, and twenty in circumference. Its flesh was good for food, and from its inertness and incapacity for defence, the race was extirpated in a few years. Steller first discovered the species in 1741, and the last known specimen was killed in 1768. It is believed to be quite extinct, as it has never been met with since.

Nearly a century ago, Sonnerat found in Madagascar, a curious animal, (Cheiromys,) which in structure seems to connect the monkeys with the squirrels. So rare was it there that even the natives viewed it with curiosity as an animal altogether unknown to them; and, from their exclamations of astonishment rather than from its cry, the French naturalist is said to have conferred upon it the name of Aye-aye, by which it is now known. Not a specimen, as I believe, has been seen since Sonnerat's day, so that, if not actually obliterated, the species must be on the verge of extinction.

Species are dying out in our own day. I have already cited the interesting case of the Moho, that fine Gallinule of New Zealand, of which a specimen—probably the last of its race,—was obtained by Mr Walter Mantell; and that of the Káureke, the badger-like quadruped of the same islands, which was formerly domesticated by the Maoris, but which now cannot be found.