QUAILS. 31? 



ever, we have the evidence of eye-witnesses. "Near 

 Constantinople, in the Autumn, the sun is often nearly 

 obscured by the prodigious flights of Quails, which alight 

 on the coasts of the Black Sea, near the Bosphorus, and 

 are caught by means of nets spread on high poles, planted 

 .along the cliff, some yards from its edge, against which 

 the birds, exhausted by their passage over the sea, strike 

 themselves and fall. In October, 1829, the Sultan sent 

 orders to one of his admirals to catch four hundred 

 dozen. In three days they were collected, and brought 

 to him alive in small cages*." Another traveller t tells 

 us that they visit Egypt in immense flights about har- 

 vest-time, where the Arabs take them by thousands, in 

 nets. They fly, he adds, in a direct line from north to 

 south, and very rarely from east to west. With respect 

 to their being dried in the sun for food, we have equally 

 good evidence from a third traveller , a foreigner, whose 

 words we will therefore translate. There is, says he, a 

 small island off the coast of Egypt, where these birds 

 usually alight in the Autumn, on which they are taken 

 in such quantities, that, after having been stripped of 

 their feathers, and dried in the burning sands for about 

 a quarter of an hour, they are worth but one penny a 

 pound. The crews of those vessels which in that season 

 lie in the adjacent harbour have no other food allowed 

 them. The object of the Israelites, therefore, in spread- 

 ing them round them the camp, was to dry them, a 

 mode of preparing fish and camels' flesh still practised 

 by the Arabs in the very same country. 



The only difficulty seems to be in their being so 

 thickly strewed as to form a solid mass of " two cubits 

 from the face of the earth." But Josephus, who must 

 be allowed to be a better judge of the meaning of words 

 in the Scripture than we can be, and more conversant 

 with the subject on which he writes, explains the passage, 

 by saying that it merely meant, that the Quails flew 



* SLADE'S Travels in Turkey, vol. i. 

 t Madden, vol. ii. * Maillet. 



