QUAILS. 297 



leave them without showing how strongly modern travellers 

 corroborate the account given in the Scriptures of the pro- 

 digious numbers of Quails, and the mode of drying them for 

 food. 



" And there went forth a wind from the Lord, and brought 

 Quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it 

 were a day's journey on this side, and as it were a day's 

 journey on the other side, round about the camp, and as 

 it were two cubits high upon the face of the earth. And the 

 people stood up all that day, and all that night, and all the 

 next day, and they gathered the Quails : he that gathered 

 least gathered ten homers ; and they spread them all abroad 

 for themselves round about the camp." (Numbers xi. 

 31, 32.) 



Their coming with the wind, their immense quantities, 

 covering a circle of thirty or forty miles, and being spread in 

 the sun for drying, appeared so impossible to one of our most 

 learned commentators on the Bible,* that he was persuaded 

 our translation was incorrect, and that instead of Quails, 

 locusts were meant. Here, however, we have the evidence of 

 eye-witnesses. " Near Constantinople, in the Autumn, the 

 sun is often nearly obscured by the prodigious nights 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."f Another traveller J tells us that 

 they visit Egypt in immense nights about harvest-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 



* Bishop Patrick. t SLADE'S Travels in Turkey, vol. i. 



t Madden, vol. ii. 



