IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends ChristopherWren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on thecasual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia , Henry Cavendish’sweighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings thathave occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestonewas being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundredmiles off the east coast of Madagascar.

There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, thefamously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a ratherirresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolationhad not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.

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