THE RAVEN. 



long stay in our pastures. They abide nowhere in 

 fact, but move from place to place, where food may 

 chance to be found. Should an animal die, 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 excep- 

 tion of the snipe, no bird seems more universally 

 spread over the surface of our globe than the raven, 

 inhabiting every zone, the hot, the temperate, the 

 severe feeding upon, and removing noxious sub- 

 stances from the earth, of which it obtains intima- 

 tion by means of a faculty we have little conception 

 of. Sight it cannot be ; and we know not of any 

 fetor escaping from an animal previous to putres- 

 cence, so subtile as to call these scavengers of nature 

 from the extremity of one county to that of another : 

 for it is manifest, from the height which they pre- 

 serve 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 con- 

 templation. 



In England the raven does not seem to abound ; 

 but it is most common on the shores of harbours, 

 or near great rivers, where animal substances are 

 more frequently to be met with than in inland 

 places. In Greenland and Iceland^ where putrescent 

 fishy substances abound, they appear to be almost 

 domesticated. Horace calls the raven " annosa 



