“It is very well preserved, only wanting the left ‘os pterygoideum;’ and the ‘condylus occipitalis,’ together with the entire border of the ‘foramen magnum’ are broken away; otherwise it is quite perfect, so that an almost complete description of the osteology of the head of this remarkable genus may be made out from it. Although I have searched through Laurentz’s ‘Museum Regium’ and the MS. Catalogue of the ‘Kunstkammer,’ I have nowhere been able to discover any notice of such a cranium having ever been possessed by the Collection, and it is therefore clear that it has preserved the present specimen quite unwittingly, and it stands probably under one of the many numbers given as referring to heads of unknown foreign birds. I have meanwhile gradually come to the conclusion that this head is in all likelihood the one called ‘Dodo’s head’ by Olearius in the year 1666, in his description of the Gottorp Kunst-Museum, which, when that museum, at least in part, was amalgamated with the Copenhagen Museum, found its way there.” (Reinhardt, in ‘Kröyer’s Naturhist. Tidsskr.’ iv. pp. 71, 72 (1842)). About ten years afterwards a portion of the bone of the upper beak of a Dodo was discovered in the Imperial and Royal Museum of Natural History at Prague[19]. Such, until the year 1865, was the sum of the remains of this large, flightless, extinct bird which were known to have reached Europe. The happy perception, by the Danish Professor J. Reinhardt, in 1843[20], of the resemblance of the beak of the Dodo to that of the tropical Doves, generically separated by Cuvier under the name _Vinago_, on account of their proportionately larger, more strongly arched, and compressed beak than in other Pigeons, and the still closer resemblance, in miniature, of the beak of the Samoan Dove to that of the great Mauritian bird, which led Titian Peale to give to the former the generic name _Didunculus_, directed the ornithologist and ornithotomist to the family in which the most instructive comparisons might be made; and the results of these, so far as relates to the head and foot and the bones of those parts, published by the authors of the above-cited work (p. 4), left little doubt of the “striking affinity which exists between this extinct bird and the Pigeons”[21]. Whatever doubt, indeed, may have lingered in the minds of naturalists as to this affinity will probably be finally set at rest by the results of the comparison of the large proportion of the skeleton of the _Didus ineptus_ which has at length been transmitted from the island of Mauritius to London, under the following circumstances.