240 Mr. J. H. Gurncy on the [Ibis, 



scent, but this is not confirmed by the observations of 

 seafaring men, see some remarks by Captain F. W. Hutton 

 (Ibis, 1865, p. 292). 



11. Vulture. — So far back as the days of Ray and 

 Willughby, it was the universal opinion of educated men 

 that Vultures were to be credited with great powers of scent. 

 The first man to cast doubt on this common report, and to 

 investigate for himself, was the American naturalist Audubon, 

 who entirely discredited any olfactory power whatever being- 

 granted to the Vultures of North America ; so did all the 

 leading naturalists of Europe, but not Charles Darwin, who, 

 however, admitted that the obtainable evidence for and 

 against was singularly balanced *. The tests used by 

 AuduboUj which were thought so much of at the time that 

 they were held by Percival Hunter to be unanswerable f, 

 are described at length in ' Jameson's Edinburgh New 

 Philosophical Journal ' (October and December 1826, No. 3); 

 Loudoun's 'Magazine of Natural History' (1834) ; and in the 

 ' Biography of the Birds of America.' They are not what 

 would be thought very convincing now, in spite of the high 

 opinion entertained of them by eminent men of that day, 

 and before long they became the object of scathing criticism 

 from a clever writer and controversialist, Charles Watcrton, 

 who maintained, as a result of personal acquaintance with 

 Vultures in Guiana, that the Black Vulture (^Cathartes 

 atrata) was directed to its food by scent |. Strange to say, 

 the Vulture question still remains almost as much a puzzle 

 as it was a hundred years ago^ and the Audubon-Water^on 

 " duel " is not fought out yet I 



There are not a few who still continue to look upon scent 

 in Vultures as an untenable theory ; apparently that view 

 was held not so very long ago at the Natural History 

 Museum — in fact, as recently as 1910, so careful a naturalist 

 as Mr. W. P. Pycraft sided with the non-scent party. 

 With so much divergence of opinion, all we can do is to 



* ' A Naturalist's Voyage,' p. 184. 



t ' Magazine of Natural History,' 1833, p. 84. 



1 Ibid., 1832, p. 240. 



