VISION. 233 
travelling map, had found his way from Point de 
Gat to Gibraltar, a distance of more than two hun- 
dred miles, through a mountainous and intricate 
country, intersected by streams, which he had never 
traversed before, and in so short a period that he 
could not have made one false turn. His not hav- 
ing been stopped on the road was attributed to the 
circumstance of his having been formerly used to 
whip criminals upon, which was indicated to the 
peasants (who have a superstitious horror of such 
asses) by the holes in his ears, to which the per- 
sons flogged were tied. 
It would appear, from an observation of Profes- 
sor Lichenstein, that birds which feed on carrion 
may probably resort to making circular flights, simi- 
lar to the pigeon, in order to discover a carcass. He 
remarked, when travelling in Southern Africa, that 
if an animal chanced to die in the very midst of the 
most desert wilderness, in less than half an hour 
there was seen high in the zenith a number of mi- 
nute objects descending in spiral circles, and in- 
creasing in visible magnitude at every revolution. 
These were soon discovered to be a flight of vul- 
tures, which must have observed from a height, 
viewless to the human eye, the dropping of the ani- 
mal immediately marked out for prey. 
Dr. James Johnson mentions a fact illustrative of 
the same view. During the northeast monsoon, 
when the wind blew steadily in one point for months 
in succession, he observed a concourse of birds of 
prey from every point of the horizon hastening to 
a corpse that was floating down the river Ganges; 
and he accounts for their thus congregating, and 
appearing suddenly from immense distances, to 
their soaring high in the air for the purpose of look- 
ing out for food. 
It is said in St. Matthew, as the received transla- 
tion gives it, that ‘“‘ where the car ass is, there will 
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