anished. The little island which has
successively borne the name of Mascaregnas, England's Forest, Bourbon
and Reunion, and lies to the southward of Mauritius, had also an allied
bird, now dead and gone. Of this not a relic has been handled by any
naturalist. The latest description of it, by Du Bois in 1674, is very
meagre, while Bontekoe (1646) gave a figure, apparently intended to
represent it. It was originally called the "solitaire," but this name
was also applied to _Pezophaps solitarius_ of Rodriguez by the Huguenot
exile Leguat, who described and figured it about 1691.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Skeleton of a male Solitaire, _Pezophaps
solitarius_, Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.]

The solitaire, Didus solitarius of Gmelin, referred by Strickland to a
district genus Pezophaps, is supposed to have lingered in the island of
Rodriguez until about 1761. Leguat[8] has given a delightful description
of its quaint habits. The male stood about 2 ft. 9 in. high; its colour
was brownish grey, that of its mate more inclined to brown, with a
whitish breast. The wings were rudimentary, the tail very small, almost
hidden, and the thigh feathers were thick and curled "like shells." A
round mass of bone, "as big as a musket ball," was developed on the
wings of the males, and they used it as a weapon of offence while they
whirled themselves about twenty or thirty times in four or five minutes,
making a noise with their pinions like a rattle. The mien was fierce and
the walk stately, the birds living singly or in pairs. The nest was a
heap of palm leaves a foot high, and contained a single large egg which
was incubated by both parents. The food consisted of seeds and leaves,
and the birds aided digestion by swallowing large stones; these were
used by the Dutch sailors to sharpen their knives with. One of these
stones, nearly an inch and a half in length, of extremely hard volcanic
rock, is in the Cambridge museum. The fighting knobs mentioned above,
are very interesting, large exostoses on one of the wrist-bones of
either wing; they were undoubtedly covered with a thick, callous skin.
Thousands of bones of this curious flightless pigeon were collected
through Sir E. Newton's[9] exertions, and by H. H. Sclater on behalf of
the Royal Society of London. The results are several almost complete
skeletons of both sexes, composed however out of the enormous mass of
the dissociated bones. (A. N.; H. F. G.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The ety