Abstract
ALTHOUGH the island of Aldabra is a British possession, its distance from the Mauritius and the Seychelles renders a supervision on the part of the Government very difficult, and no control whatever can be exercised on crews of ships who land there chiefly for the purpose of cutting wood, which they require for curing fish, &c. Information having reached England in the course of last year that it was intended to lodge permanently wood-cutting parties on the island, the speedy extinction of the tortoises seemed imminent; and the time to prevent this seemed ail the more opportune, as the then Governor of the Mauritius, Sir Arthur Gordon, was known to take great interest in all matters relating to natural history. Consequently the following memorial was addressed to him, signed by the presidents of the Royal and Royal Geographical Societies, and other men of science who had made researches into the extinct fauna of these islands:—
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GÜNTHER, A. The Gigantic Land Tortoises of the Mascarene and Galapagos Islands* II.. Nature 12, 259–261 (1875). https://doi.org/10.1038/012259a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/012259a0
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