Many naturalists gave figures of the dodo after the commencement of the seventeenth century; and there is a painting of it in the British Museum, which is said to have been taken from a living individual.  Beneath the painting is a leg, in a fine state of preservation, which ornithologists are agreed cannot belong to any other known bird.  In the museum at Oxford, also, there is a foot and a head, in an imperfect state, but M. Cuvier doubts the identy of this species with that of which the painting is preserved in London.

In spite of the most active search, during the last century, no information respecting the dodo was obtained, and some authors have gone so far as to pretend that it never existed; but amongst a great mass of satisfactory evidence in favour of the recent existence of this species, we may mention that an assemblage of fossil bones were recently discovered, under a bed of lava, in the Isle of France, and sent to the Paris museum by M. Desjardins.  They almost all belonged to a large living species of land-tortoise, called Testudu Indica, but amongst them were the head, sternum, and humerus of the dodo.  M. Cuvier showed me these valuable remains in Paris, and assured me that they left no doubt in his mind that the huge bird was one of the gallinaceous tribe.

Next to the direct agency of man, his indirect influence in multiplying the numbers of large herbivorous quadrupeds of domesticated races, may be regarded as one of the most obviate causes of the extermination of species.  On this, and on several other grounds, the introduction of the horse, ox, and other mammalia, into America, and their rapid propagation over that continent within the last three centuries, is a fact of great importance in natural history.  The extraordinary herds of wild cattle and horses which overran the plains of South America, sprang from a very few pairs first carried over by the Spaniards; and they prove that the wide geographical range of large species in great continents does not necessarily imply that they have existed there from remote periods.  Humboldt observes, in his Travels, on the authority of Azara, that it is believed there exist, in the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, twelve million cows and three million horses, without comprising in this enumeration the cattle that have no acknowledged proprietor.  In the Llanos of Caraccas, the rich hateros, or proprietors of pastoral farms, are entirely ignorant of the number of cattle they possess.  The young are branded with a mark peculiar to each herd, and some of the most wealthy owners mark as many as fourteen thousand a year.  In the northern plains, from the Orinoco to the lake of Maracaybo, M. Depons reckoned that one million two hundred thousand oxen, one hundred and eighty thousand horses, and ninety thousand mules, wandered at large.  In some parts of the valley of the Mississippi, especially in the country of the Osage Indians, wild horses are immensely numerous.