1922.] Soisc of Smell />ossessed b>/ Birds. 233 



PART II. 



Indications that binls are capahle of scenting food. 

 Having now quoted several adverse opinions about scent, 

 and most of what there is to be said against the scent 

 theory having been brought forward, it remains to cite 

 several facts which tell in its favour. With this in view 

 it is proposed to put into the witness box the Black 

 Vulture (^CatJiartes), of which there is a great deal to say, 

 and eight or nine other species, namely, the Raven, the 

 Rook, the Hooded Crow, the Woodpecker, the Sandpiper, 

 the Great Shearwater, the family of Petrels, and the Apteryx. 

 1. The Raven. — We first meet with the notion that birds 

 have any powers of smell in a very old belief about the Raven 

 ( Corvus corax) . For centuries there has been a persistent idea 

 that Ravens were gifted with the faculty of discovering the 

 approach of death in a house where there was malignant 

 disease, and presumably this could only be accomplished by 

 their possessing acute scent perception, unless indeed they 

 have some occult food-finding faculty, which has been also 

 suspected in Vultures. Belief in the strange powers of the 

 Raven was far from being confined to Eniiland ; no "reat 

 research is needed for tracing it in many other countries 

 besides our own. In the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries, that the Raven "smells death"' was a matter of 

 common credence in Scotland, in the Shetlands, in the Isle 

 of Man, in Ireland, in Wales, and in parts of Germany, but 

 it did not extend much farther south than that, and seems to 

 have had little or no currency in France and Ital}'. It was 

 the popular idea in northern rather than in southern coun- 

 tries, — that is what the well-known lines which Shakespeare 

 has put into the mouth of the jealous Othello in one of his 

 most famous plays, represent : 



•' As doth the Raven, o'er the infected house 



Boding to all " 



Othello, Act iv. scene 1. 



That the belief expressed by the Elizabetlian poets and 



upheld by ]at(n- writers of repute, German as well as Fnglish, 



