250 FACULTIES OF BIRDS. 



either to refer this circumstance to smell, or to some 

 mysterious sense inscrutable to human penetration. 

 " Should an animal die," he says, " or a limb of fresh 

 carrion be on the hooks in the tree, the hoarse croak 

 of the raven is sure immediately to be heard calling 

 his congeners to the banquet. We see it daily in 

 its progress of inspection, or high in the air on a 

 transit to other regions, hastening, we conjecture, to 

 some distant prey. With the exception of the snipe, 

 no bird seems more universally spread over the sur- 

 face of our globe than the raven, inhabiting every 

 zone, the hot, the temperate, the severe ; feeding 

 upon and removing noxious substances from the 

 earth, of which it obtains intimation by means of a 

 faculty we have little conception of. Sight it can- 

 not be ; and we know not of any fetor escaping 

 from an animal previous to putrescence so subtile 

 as to call these scavengers of nature from the ex- 

 tremity of one county to that of another : for it is 

 manifest from the height which they preserve in 

 their flight, and the haste they are making, that their 

 departure has been from some far distant station, 

 having a remote and urgent object in contempla- 

 tion."* 



Water-birds (Natatores, ILLIGER) might be suppo- 

 sed, from the considerable development of their 

 nerves of smell, to have this sense very acute. The 

 organs of smell in the goose, however, are consid- 

 erably less developed than those of the duck. The 

 petrels, we might infer, ought to possess an acute 

 smell, as their nostrils are not only large, but differ- 

 ent from other birds ; they project distinctly from 

 the beak, forming a singular-looking sort of nose, 

 in some species, such as the pintado petrel (Procel- 

 laria capensis), nearly an inch long ; in the giant pet- 

 erel (P. gigantea, GMELIN) it is much more. As these 

 birds do not fly so high in the air as vultures and 

 ravens, and live upon dead fish and similar garbage, 

 * Journal of a Naturalist, p. 172, 3d edit. 



