M. Alph. Milne-Edwards presented to the Section of Anatomy and Zoology of the French Academy of Sciences, on the 10th May 1875, his Observations on the Epoch of the Disappearance of the Ancient Fauna of the Island Rodriguez, in which he announced the discovery by M. Rouillard, a magistrate of Mauritius, among the archives of the Ministry of Marine at Paris, of a manuscript entitled Relation de l'île Rodrigue, reported to him by Professor A. Newton, of Cambridge, who requested him (M. Milne-Edwards) to make further investigation to fix the epoch when this manuscript was written; for it bore no date or name of author, but had been found bound up in tome xii of the Correspondence of the Ile de France, a.d. 1760. Was this date exact as regards the manuscript, and was it to be concluded that from this MS. narrative that the birds in question were still alive in 1760—that is to say, almost after a century from the time that Leguat wrote?

M. Milne-Edwards was able to convince himself that this document was of older date than that of the correspondence with which it was bound up; and, although he was unable to discover the name of the author, he was able to fix the date when it was written.