FABLE AND FOLKLORE 75 



in his widely used reference-book Phrase and Fable 

 (which unfortunately is far from trustworthy in the de- 

 partment of natural history) when he records: "Ravens 

 by their acute sense of smell, discern the savor of dying 

 bodies, and under the hope of preying on them, light on 

 chimney-tops or flutter about sick-rooms." 



The correction to be made here is not to the gruesome 

 superstition but to the asserted keenness of the bird's 

 sense of smell. The gathering of vultures to a dead 

 animal is not by its odor, but by the sight of the carcass 

 by one, and the noting of signs of that fact by others, 

 who hasten to investigate the matter. Oliver Goldsmith 32 

 fell into the same error when he wrote of the protective 

 value, as he esteemed it, of this sense in birds in general, 

 "against their insidious enemies" ; and cited the practice 

 of decoymen, formerly so numerous as wildfowl trappers 

 in the east of England, "who burn turf to hide their 

 scent from the ducks." The precaution was wasted, for 

 none of the senses in birds is so little developed or of 

 so small use as the olfactory. Goldsmith's Animated 

 Nature was, a century ago, the fountain of almost all 

 popular knowledge of natural history among English- 

 reading people, and was often reprinted. As a whole it 

 was a good and useful book, but its accomplished author 

 was not a trained naturalist, and absorbed some state- 

 ments that were far from authentic — perhaps in some 

 cases he was so pleased with the narrative that he was not 

 sufficiently critical of its substance, as in the story of 

 the storks in Smyrna: 



The inhabitants amuse themselves by taking away some of 

 the storks' eggs from the nests on their roofs, and replacing 

 them with fowls' eggs. "When the young are hatched the saga- 

 cious male bird discovers the difference of these from their own 



