Passing over the visits to the isles of four old Dutch navigators, who all describe the dodo under different names, we come to the quaint old traveller, Sir Thomas Herbert, who touched at the Mauritius in 1627. In his _Relation of some Yeare's Travaile_, he thus describes the bird:--'The dodo; a bird the Dutch call walghvogel or dod eersen; her body is round and fat, which occasions the slow pace, or that her corpulencie; and so great as few of them weigh less than fifty pound: better to the eye than stomack: greasy appetites may perhaps commend them, but to the indifferently curious in nourishment, prove offensive. Let's take her picture: her visage darts forth melancholy, as if sensible of Nature's injurie in framing so great and massie a body to be directed by such small and complementall wings, as are unable to hoise her from the ground; serving only to prove her a bird, which otherwise might be doubted of. Her head is variously drest, the one-half hooded with downy blackish feathers; the other perfectly naked, of a whitish hue, as if a transparent lawne had covered it. Her bill is very howked, and bends downwards; the thrill or breathing-place is in the midst of it, from which part to the end the colour is a light green mixed with a pale yellowe; her eyes be round and small, and bright as diamonds; her clothing is of finest downe, such as you see on goslins. Her trayne is (like a China beard) of three or four short feathers; her legs thick, black, and strong; her tallons or pounces sharp; her stomach fiery hot, so as she easily can digest stones.' As a 'China beard' consists of only a few hairs under the chin, the above simile is correct; but in the French edition of these travels, the translator erroneously rendered the words _oiseau de Chine_, Chinese bird, and subsequently, a celebrated French savant raised a magnificent hypothetical edifice on the basis of the mistranslation.