more about the ostrich than about most other birds of foreign climes.
Few people have not heard that the egg of the ostrich weighs three
pounds--that the sun is the bird's Cantelo--that he has only two toes
to each foot--that he sometimes exceeds six feet in height--and that
it would not be an act of madness to back a stout specimen, for speed,
against an average horse. The digestion of the ostrich has been
considerably strengthened in the minds of unscientific persons by
imaginative travellers; the fact being that these birds live upon
vegetable food, occasionally swallowing stones, or a bit of iron, in
aid of that digestion which has been so misrepresented. In the cases
before the visitor are the African ostrich, and his relations, the
Australian cassowary, and the American emu--all characterised by the
absence of a hind toe. Having noticed these fine birds, the visitor
will be anxious to learn something of the mysterious case (108), which
contains a foot, the cast of a skull, and a painting. Here he sees all
that has yet been traced of the extinct dodo, a bird which is believed
to have existed in vast numbers up to a recent period, chiefly on the
Bourbon and Mauritius islands. The painting is said to be an authentic
Dutch performance, taken from the living bird at the time when the
Cape of Good Hope was doubled by adventurous men heated with
exaggerated notions of the exhaustless wealth of the Indies. Its
precise position among birds has not been finally assigned. It appears
to have been incapable of flight, to have had a vulture's head, and
the foot of a common fowl. It is conjectured that the race was
extinguished by the rapacity of the first settlers in the Mauritius,
who, finding the dodo excellent eating and an easy prey, demolished
every specimen of the species. Near these wrecks of the dodo, and in
the same case, is the New Zealand wingless bird, now almost extinct,
but to scientific men an interesting link between the bird and the
mammalia. The Bustards occupy the two next cases (110, 111) to which