CARRION-VULTURES. 237 



mentioned garden the following experiment : the 

 condors were tied, each by a rope, in a long row 

 at the bottom of a wall ; and having folded up a 

 piece of meat in white paper, I walked backwards 

 and forwards, carrying it in my hand at the distance 

 of about three yards from them, but no notice what- 

 ever was taken. I then threw it on the ground, 

 within one yard of an old male bird ; he looked at 

 it for a moment with attention, but then regarded 

 it no more. With a stick I pushed it closer and 

 closer, until at last he touched it with his beak ; the 

 paper was then instantly torn off with fury, and at 

 the same moment every bird in the long row be- 

 gan struggling and flapping its wings. Under the 

 same circumstances, it would have been quite im- 

 possible to have deceived a dog. The evidence in 

 favour of and against the acute smelling powers 

 of carrion-vultures is singularly balanced. Profess- 

 or Owen has demonstrated that the olfactory nerves 

 of the turkey-buzzard (Cathartes aura) are highly 

 developed ; and on the evening when Mr. Owen's 

 paper was read at the Zoological Society, it was 

 mentioned by a gentleman that he had seen the 

 carrion-hawks in the West Indies on two occasions 

 collect on the roof of a house when a corpse had 

 become offensive from not having been buried : in 

 this case, the intelligence could hardly have been 

 acquired by sight. On the other hand, besides the 

 experiments of Audubon and that one by myself, 

 Mr. Bachman has tried in the United States many 

 varied plans, showing that neither the turkey-buz- 

 zard (the species dissected by Professor Owen) nor 

 the gallinazo find their food by smell. He covered 

 portions of highly oftensive offal with a thin canvass 

 cloth, and strewed pieces of meat on it ; these the 

 carrion-vultures ate up, and then remained quietly 

 standing, with their beaks within the eighth of an 



