the Spanish sovereigns, from Charles V. of the Austrian to Charles III. of the Bourbon race. Lord Hervey has made notorious George II.'s ignorance and dislike of art. Among the many noble and kingly qualities of his grandson, we fear a love and appreciation of art may not be reckoned; and although, in his intercourse with men of genius, George IV. was gracious and generous, what can be said in favour of his taste and discernment? The previous life of William IV., the mature age at which he ascended the throne, and the troublous character of his reign, explain why art received but slight countenance from the court of the frank and noble-hearted Sailor Prince; but we turn with hope to the future. The recent proceedings in the Court of Chancery have made public a fact, already known to many, that her Majesty wields with skilful hand a graceful graver, and the Christmas plays acted at Windsor are a satisfactory proof that English art and genius are not exiled from England's palaces. The professors, then, of that art which Velasquez and Rubens, Murillo and Vandyck practised, shall yet see that the Crown of England is not only in ancient legal phrase, the Fountain of Honour," but that it loves to direct its grateful streams in their honoured direction. Free was the intercourse, unfettered the conversation, independent the relations, between Titian and Charles V., Velasquez and Philip IV.; let us hope that Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle will yet witness a revival of those palmy days of English art, when Inigo Jones, and Vandyck, and Cowley, Waller, and Ben Jonson, shed a lustre on the art-loving court of England!

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The extracts we have given from Mr. Stirling's work will have sufficiently shown the scope of the Annals, and the spirit and style in which they are written. There is no tedious, inflexible, though often unmanageable leading idea, or theory of art, running through these lively volumes. In the introduction, what ever is to be said on the philosophy of Spanish art is carefully collected, and the reader is thenceforward left at liberty to carry on the conclusions of the introduction with him in his per

usal of the Annals, or to drop them at the threshold. We would, however, strongly recommend all who desire to appreciate Spanish art, never to forget that she owes all her beauty and inspiration to Spanish nature and Spanish religion. Remember this, O holiday tourist along the Andalusian coast, or more adventurous explorer of Castile and Estremadura, and you will not be disappointed with her productions. Mr. Stirling has not contented himself with doing ample justice to the great painters, and slurring over the comparatively unknown artists, whose merits are in advance of their fame, but has embraced in his careful view the long line of Spanish artists who have flourished or faded in the course of nearly eight hundred years; and he has accomplished this difficult task, not in the plodding spirit of a Dryasdust, or with the curt dulness of a catalogue-monger, but with the discriminating good taste of an accomplished English gentleman, and in a style at once racy and rhetorical. There are whole pages in the Annals as full of picturesque beauty as the scenes or events they describe, and of melody, as an Andalusian summer's eve; indeed, the vigorous fancy and genial humour of the anthor have, on some few occasions, led him to stray from those strict rules of didus, which we are old-fashioned enough to wish always observed. But where the charms and merits are so great and so many, and the defects so few and so small, we may safely leave the discovery of the latter to the critical reader, and satisfy our conscience by expressing a hope that, when Mr. Stirling next appears in the character of author-a period not remote, we sincerely trust he will have discarded those few scentless flowers from his literary garden, and present us with a bouquet

"Full of sweet buds and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie."

But if he never again put pen to paper, in these annals of the artists of Spain he has given to the reading public a work which, for utility of design, patience of research, and grace of language, merits and has won the highest honours of authorship.

WHAT was the Dodo? When was the Dodo? Where is the Dodo? are all questions, the first more especially, which it is fully more easy to ask than answer. Whoever has looked through books on natural history-for example, that noted but now scarce instructor of our early youth, the Three Hundred Animals-must have observed a somewhat ungainly creature, with a huge curved bill, a short ish neck, scarcely any wings, a plumy tuft upon the back-considerably on the off-side, though pretending to be a tail,—and a very shapeless body, extraordinarily large and round about the hinder end. This anomalous animal being covered with feathers, and having, in addition to the other attributes above referred to, only two legs, has been, we think justly, re garded as a bird, and has accordingly been named the Dodo. But why it should be so named is another of the many mysterious questions, which require to be considered in the history of this unaccountable creature. No one alleges, nor can we conceive it possible, that it claims kindred with either of the only two human beings we ever heard of who bore the name: “And after him (Adino the Eznite) was Eleazar the son of Dodo, the Ahohite, one of the three mighty men with David, when they defied the Philistines that were there gathered together to battle, and the men of Israel were gone away." Our only other human Dodo belonged to the fair sex, and was the mother of the famous Zoroaster, who flourished in the days of Darius Hystaspes, and brought back the Persians to their ancient fire-worship, from the adoration of the twinkling stars. The name appears to have been dropped by both families, as if they were somewhat ashamed of it; and we feel

*

assured that of such of our readers as admit that Zoroaster must have had a mother of some sort, very few really remember nowadays that her name was Dodo. There were no baptismal registers in those times; or, if such existed, they were doubtless consumed in the "great fire"-a sort of periodical, it may be providential,mode of shortening the record, which seems to occur from time to time in all civilized countries,

But while the creature in question, -we mean the feathered biped-has been continuously presented to view in those "vain repetitions" which unfortunately form the mass of our information in all would-be popular works on natural history, we had actually long been at a stand-still in relation to its essential attributes-the few competent authorities who had given out their opinion upon this, as many thought, stereotyped absurdity, being so disagreed among themselves as to make confusion worse confounded. The case, indeed, seemed desperate; and had it not been that we always entertained a particular regard for old Clusius (of whom byand-by), and could not get over the fact that a Dodo's head existed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and a Dodo's foot in the British Museum, London, we would willingly have indulged the thought that the entire Dodo was itself a dream. But, shaking off the cowardly indolence which would seek to shirk the investigation of so great a question, let us now inquire into a piece of ornithological biography, which seemed so singularly to combine the familiar with the fabulous. Thanks to an accomplished and persevering naturalist of our own day one of the most successful and assiduous inquirers of the younger generation-we have now all the facts, and most of the fancies, laid before us

VOL. LXV.

6

in a splendid royal quarto volume, just published, with numerous plates, devoted to the history and illustration of the "Dodo and its Kindred." It was, in truth, the latter term that cheered our heart, and led us again towards a subject which had previously produced the greatest despondency; for we had always, though most erroneously, fancied that the great misformed lout of our Three Hundred Animals was all alone in the wide world, unable to provide for himself (and so, fortunately, without a family), and had never, in truth, had either predecessors or posterity. Mr. Strickland, however, has brought together the disjecta membra of a family group, showing not only fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, but cousins, and kindred of all degrees. Their sedate and somewhat sedentary mode of life is probably to be accounted for, not so much by their early habits as their latter end. Their legs are short, their wings scarcely existant, but they are prodigiously large and heavy in the hinder-quarters; and organs of flight would have been but a vain thing for safety, as they could not, in such wooded countries as these creatures inhabited, have been made commensurate with the uplifting of such solid bulk, placed so far behind that centre of gravity where other wings are worked. We can now sit down in Mr. Strickland's company, to discuss the subject, not only tranquilly, but with a degree of cheerfulness which we have not felt for many a day; thanks to his kindly consideration of the Dodo and "its kindred."

The geographical reader will remember that to the eastward of the great, and to ourselves nearly unknown, island of Madagascar, there lies a small group of islands of volcanic organ, which, though not exactly contiguous among themselves, are yet nearer to each other than to the greater island just named, and which is interposed between them and the coast of Southern Africa. They are named Rodriguez, Bourbon, and Mauritius, or the Isle of France. There is proof that not fewer than four distinct species of large-bodied, short-winged birds, of the Dodo type, were their inhabitants in comparatively recent times, and have now become utterly

extinct. We say utterly, because neither proof nor vestige of their existence elsewhere has been at any time afforded; and the comparatively small extent, and now peopled state of the islands in question (where they are no longer known), make the continuous and unobserved existence of these birds, so conspicuous in size and slow of foot, impossible.

16

Now, it is this recent and total extinction which renders the subject one of more than ordinary interest. Death is an admitted law of nature, in respect to the individuals of all species. Geology, dragging at each remove a lengthened chain," has shown how, at different and distant eras, innumerable tribes have perished and been supplanted, or at least replaced, by other groups of species, entire races, better fitted for the great climatic and other physical changes, which our earth's surface has undergone from time to time. How these changes were brought about, many, with more or less success (generally less), have tried to say. Organic remains-that is, the fossilized remnants of ancient speciessometimes indicate a long continuance of existence, generation after generation living in tranquillity, and finallý sinking in a quiet grave; while other examples show a sudden and violent death, in tortuous and excited action, as if they had been almost instantaneously overwhelmed and destroyed by some great catastrophe.

Several local extinctions of elsewhere existing species are known to naturalists-such as those of the beaver, and bear, and the wolf, which no longer occur in Great Britain, though historically known, as well as organically proved by recent remains, to have lived and died among us. Their extinction was slow and gradual, and resulted entirely from the inroads which the human race-that is, the increase of population, and the progress of agriculture and commerce- -necessarily made upon their numbers, which thus became "few by degrees, and beautifully less." The beaver might have carried on business well enough, in his own quiet way, although frequently incommoded by the love of peltry on the part of a hat-wearing people! but it is clear that no man with a small family, and

a few respectable farm-servants, could either permit a large and hungry wolf to be continually peeping at midnight through the key-hole of the nursery, or allow a brawny bruin to snuff too frequently under the kitchen door (after having hugged the watch-dog to death), when the serving-maids were at supper. The extirpation, then, of at least two of those quondam British species became a work of necessity and mercy, and might have been tolerated even on a Sunday between sermons-especially as naturalists have it still in their power to study the habits of similar wild beasts, by no means yet extinct, in the neighbouring countries of France and Germany.

But the death of the Dodo and its kindred is a more affecting fact, as involving the extinction of an entire race, root and branch, and proving that death is a law of the species, as well as of the individuals which compose it, although the life of the one is so much more prolonged than that of the other that we can seldom obtain any positive proof of its extinction, except by the observance of geological eras. Certain other still existing species, well known to naturalists, may be said to be, as it were, just hovering on the brink of destruction. One of the largest and most remarkable of herbivorous animals-a species of wild-cattle, the aurochs or European bison (B. priscus)-exists now only in the forest of Bialowicksa, from whence the Emperor of Russia has recently transmitted a living pair to the Zoological Society of London. Several kinds of birds are also evidently on their last legs. For example, a singular species of parrot (Nestor productus), with the termination of the upper mandible much attenuated, peculiar to Phipps's Island, near Norfolk Island, has recently ceased to exist there in the wild state, and is now known as a living species only from a few surviving specimens kept in cages, and which refuse to breed. The burrowing parrot from New Zealand is already on the road to ruin; and more than one species of that singular and wingless bird, called Apteryx, also from the last-named island, may be placed in the same category. Even in our own country, if the landed pro

prietors were to yield to the clamour of the Anti-Game-Law League, the red grouse or moor-game might cease to be, as they occur nowhere else on the known earth save in Britain and the Emerald Isle.

The geographical distribution of animals, in general, has been made conformable to laws which we cannot fathom. A mysterious relationship exists between certain organic struc tures and those districts of the earth's surface which they inhabit. Certain extensive groups, in both the animal and vegetable kingdom, are found to be restricted to particular continents, and their neighbouring islands. Of some the distribution is very extensive, while others are totally unknown except within a limited space, such as some solitary isle, "Placed far amid the melancholy main."

"In the present state of science," says Mr. Strickland, "we must be content to admit the existence of this law, without being able to enunciate its preamble. It does not imply that organic distribution depends on soil and climate; for we often find a perfect identity of these conditions in opposite hemispheres, and flore are almost wholly diverse. It does in remote continents, whose faunæ and not imply that allied but distinct organisms have been adduced, by generation or spontaneous development, from the same original stock; for (to pass over other objections) we find detached volcanic islets, which have been ejected from beneath the ocean (such as the Galapagos, for instance), inhabited by terrestrial tinent, though hundreds of miles distant, and evidently never connected with them. But this fact may indicate that the Creator, in forming new organisms to discharge the functions required from time to time by the ever vacillating balance of nature, has thought fit to preserve the regularity of the system by modifying the types of structure already established in the adjacent localities, rather than to forms of more foreign aspect." proceed per saltum by introducing

forms allied to those of the nearest con

In conformity with this relation between geographical distribution and organic structure, it has been ascertained that a small portion of the indigenous animals and plants of the islands of Rodriguez, Bourbon, and the Isle of France, are either allied to or identical with the productions of

continental Africa, a larger portion with those of Madagascar, while certain species are altogether peculiar to the insular group above named.

"And as these three islands form a detached cluster, as compared to other lands, so do we find in them a peculiar group of birds, specifically different in each island, yet allied together in their general characters, and remarkably isolated from any known forms in other parts of the world. These birds were of large size and grotesque proportions, the wings too short and feeble for flight, the plumage loose and decomposed, and the general aspect suggestive of gigantic immaturity. Their history is as remarkable as their origin. About two centuries ago, their native isles were first colonised by man, by whom these strange creatures were speedily exterminated. So rapid and so complete was their extinction, that the vague descriptions given of them by early navigators were long regarded as fabulous or exaggerated; and these birds, almost contemporaries of our greatgrandfathers, became associated in the minds of many persons with the griffin and the phoenix of mythological antiquity."

The aim and object of Mr. Strickland's work is to vindicate the honesty of the rude voyagers of the sevenbeenth century; to collect together the scattered evidence regarding the Dodo and its kindred; to describe and depict the few anatomical fragments which are still extant of those lost species; to invite scientific travellers to further and more minute research; and to infer, from the authentic data now in hand, the probable rank and position of these creatures in the scale of nature. We think he has achieved his object very admirably, and has produced one of the best and most interesting monographs with which it is our fortune to be acquainted.

So far as we can see, the extension of man's more immediate influence and agency is the sole cause of the disappearance of species in modern times -at least we have no proof that any of these species have perished by what can be called a catastrophe: this is well exemplified by what we now know of the Dodo and its kindred.

The islands of Mauritius and Bourbon were discovered in the sixteenth century (authorities differ as to the precise period, which they vary from 1502 to 1545), by Pedro Mascaregnas,

a Portuguese, who named the latter after himself; while he called the former Cerne, a term applied by Pliny to an island in another quarter. Of this Cerne nothing definite was ascertained till the year 1598, when the Dutch, under Jacob Cornelius Neck, finding it uninhabited, took possession, and changed its name to Mauritius. In the narrative of the voyage, of which there are several accounts in different tongues, we find the following notice :

"This island, besides being very fertile in terrestrial products, feeds vast numbers of birds, such as turtle-doves, which occur in such plenty that three of our men sometimes captured one hundred and fifty in half a day, and might easily have taken more by hand, or killed them with sticks, if we had not been overloaded with the burden of them. Grey parrots are also common there, and other birds, besides a large kind bigger than our swans, with large heads, half of which is covered with skin like a hood. These birds want wings, in place of which are three or four thickish feathers. The tail consists of a few slender curved feathers of a grey colour. We that, the longer they were boiled, the called them Walckvogel, for this reason, tougher and more uneatable they became. Their stomachs, however, and breasts, were easy to masticate. other reason for the name was that we had an abundance of turtle-doves, of a much sweeter and more agreeable flavour."-De Bry's India Orientalis (1601), pars v. p. 7.

An

These walckvogel were the birds soon afterwards called Dodos. The description given by Clusius, in his Exotica (1605), is chiefly taken from one of the published accounts of Van Neck's voyage; but he adds the following notice, as from personal obser

vation:

"After I had written down the history of this bird as well as I could, I happened to see in the house of Peter Pauwins, Professor of Medicine in the University of Leyden, a leg cut off at the knee, and recently brought from the Mauritius. It was not very long, but rather exceeded four inches from the knee to the bend of the foot. Its thickness, however, was great, being nearly four inches in circumrous scales, which in front were wider and ference; and it was covered with numeyellow, but smaller and dusky behind. The upper part of the toes was also furnished with single broad scales, while the