It is not surprising that the awkward,
slow-paced dodo, incapable of flight, and whose nest, as we are told
by Cauche, never contained more than one egg, became totally extinct
soon after coming into contact with man. Nor would man alone be
directly the dodo's destroyer; his immediate followers, the cat, hog,
and dog, must have been fatal neighbours to its young. Leguat, a
gentleman of education, spent several months on the Mauritius in 1693,
but makes no mention of the dodo. He says: 'This island was formerly
full of birds, but now they are becoming very scarce;' and further
adds: 'Here are pigs of the China breed. These beasts do a great deal
of damage to the inhabitants, by devouring all the young animals they
can catch.' Less than a century, then, sufficed to extirpate the dodo.
It was first seen in 1598--it was last noticed in 1679; and as Leguat,
in 1693, does not mention it, we may conclude that it became extinct
at some period between the last two dates. In 1712, the Dutch
evacuated the Mauritius, and three years afterwards the French took
possession, naming it l'Ile de France. With this change of population,
the very tradition of the dodo's existence on that island was
completely lost.
The relics of the dodo, still left to admiring naturalists, are few,
but, in a scientific view, very precious. They consist in all of a
head and leg in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, a leg in the British
Museum, and a head in the Royal Museum (_Kunst-Kammer_) at Copenhagen.
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