70 FACULTIES OF BIRDS. 



Dr. Latham that vultures, " when left to themselves, 

 rather prefer flesh already tainted than fresh meat. 

 In this circumstance of their disposition," he adds, 

 " I am clear, in respect of the carrion vulture of 

 Jamaica, two of which I kept alive for some time in 

 my garden. They would indeed eat raw flesh, but 

 expressed particular pleasure when any tainted food 

 was offered them, fluttering with expanded wings and 

 falling on with double appearance of appetite, as well 

 as devouring twice the quantity as at other times*." 



The raven is another of those birds which have 

 been celebrated for discovering distant objects by the 

 smell, which Bingley thinks " must be very acute ; for 

 in the coldest winter days, at Hudson's Bay, when 

 every kind of effluvia is almost instantaneously de- 

 stroyed by the frost, buffaloes and other beasts have 

 been killed where not one of these birds was to be 

 seen, but in a few hours scores of them have been 

 found collected about the spot to pick up the blood 

 and offal f.'' Mr. Knapp is also disposed 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 tran- 

 sit to other regions, hastening, we conjecture, to some 

 distant prey. With the exception 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 substances from the earth, of which 

 it obtains intimation 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 pre- 



* Gen, Hist, of Birds, i. 2. f Animal Biog. ii. 242. 



