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,
(_Cheiromy