274 Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 



hours given up to a most intense discussion by Elliott, True, 

 Coues and Gill on a point which seems not to have the slightest 

 practical value to the world and which was finally settled in 

 three minutes by Doctor Dall when, at the meeting of April 19, 

 1890 (years later), he exhibited a map drawn by a member of 

 the Behring Expedition on the margin of which was a sketch 

 from nature showing the tail in the position in which it was said 

 to be by some one or more of the disputants, I don't know which. 

 There is another subject that came up for discussion several 

 times in the early years of the society, and that is as to whether 

 the turkey buzzard finds its food by sight or by an extraordinary 

 sense of smell. The first time, I think, that this subject was 

 brought up was in the discussion of a paper entitled " Notes 

 Relative to the Sense of Smell in the Turkey Buzzard, " read by 

 Mr. C. L. Hopkins at the meeting of December 17, 1887. As I 

 recollect, Mr. Hopkins was decidedly of the opinion that buz- 

 zards find their food by means of some extraordinary sense of 

 smell; but there was a long and rather heated discussion, with 

 the preponderance with Mr. Hopkins. Either he or one of the 

 other speakers, I remember, told the story of some carrion com- 

 pletely hidden from view by a shed or something of the sort 

 which attracted buzzards from great distances. But after many 

 remarks, the following story was told of observations made by 

 the late Dr. Otto Lugger. It seems that at a point on the beach 

 of the lower Potomac, or it may have been Chesapeake Bay, 

 there was a bluff a bit from the beach, and a fence running along 

 the bluff. The farmers had the custom of collecting the useless 

 fish, alewives and others, stranded on the beach or discarded 

 from seines, carrying them up the bluff and putting them in a 

 trench behind the fence, covering them with a sprinkling of 

 earth, and eventually using them to fertilize their fields. Now, 

 according to Lugger, buzzards would alight on the fence, always 

 facing the beach, and would stand there for hours watching the 

 shore for food. In the meantime the stench from the decaying 

 fish ten feet behind them was overpowering; yet they sat there 

 in their ignorance waiting for food on the beach totally uncon- 

 scious of the hundreds of pounds of deliciously decaying food 

 immediately behind them. After this story was told the argu- 

 ment stoppped; not another word was said, and the society ad- 



