Its powerful bill enabled it to break, and its
capacious, stone-supplied gizzard to digest, the hardest shells and
kernels; and thus a kind of frugivorous vulture, it cleared away the
decaying vegetable matter. In no other place than an island,
uninhabited by man or any other animal of prey, could the helpless
dodo have existed. Some fancy it may yet be found in Madagascar. Vain
idea! Its carnivorous enemies among the lower animals, would have cut
short the existence of the dodo, even if man had never planted his
conquering footsteps upon that island.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Walgen_, to nauseate; _vogel_, a bird.
[2] _Waerachtigh Verhael van de Schipvaert op Ost-Indien, Ghedaen by
de Acht Schepen in den Jare 1598._
[3] A hole is here burned in the manuscript, as if by the ash of a
tobacco-pipe. At the first hiatus, the word wanting is, without doubt,
_saw_; and at the second, the letters, _of can_.
MONOPOLIES.
In the High Street of Edinburgh, not many doors further up than the
premises of the publishers of this Journal, there is a curious
memorial of an old and now generally abolished economic grievance. It
is a portrait of a certain Dr Patrick Anderson, a physician of the
reign of Charles I. It is an old portrait, or rather the
representative of an old portrait, since it has necessarily been
repainted from time to time, the atmosphere of Scotland not being
favourable to the preservation of works of art in the open air.
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