Every reader of popular natural history must recollect the figure of
this extraordinary bird; although he may not be aware that it is
considered to have become extinct towards the end of the seventeenth
or beginning of the eighteenth century. The conditions of this
disappearance are self-evident.[15] Imagine a bird of the gallinaceous
(_gallus_, cock, or pheasant) tribe, considerably larger than a
turkey, and consequently adapted for food, totally incapable of
flying, and so unwieldy as to be easily run down, and it must be quite
obvious that such a bird could not long continue to exist in any
country to which mankind extended their dominion. This will account
for its being found only in those islands of the Indian Ocean which,
on their being first discovered by Europeans, were uninhabited, or
difficult of access to the nearest people. The group which is situated
to the eastward of Madagascar, consisting of Bourbon, Mauritius, and
Roderigue, were almost the only islands of this description met with
by the early circumnavigators of the Cape; and it is there that we
find the last traces of this very remarkable bird, which disappeared,
of course, from Bourbon and the Mauritius _first_, on account of their
being more visited and finally colonized by the French; and lastly
from Roderigue, an island extremely difficult of access, and without
any safe bay or anchorage for shipping.

[15] We are aware that the destruction or total extinction of
any of the species of animals of contemporaneous creation
with man, is a point of much controversy among
philosophers. The best reply to this doubt is the
repeated discovery of the fossil remains of animals
entirely different from the existing species; proving