4 BIRDS OF INDIA. 



head and part of the neck often bare, or only clad with a few 

 hairs or down. The crop, too, is prominent, and is either naked or 

 covered with woolly hairs. The eye is small, on a level with the 

 head, and not protected by the bony ridge which gives their keen 

 look to the Eagles and Falcons; the wings are very long, and more 

 or less pointed, and the tail short. The sternum has the keel 

 moderate, smaller than in the Falconidce, and is reduced anteriorly. 

 It varies in form in the different sub-families. The furcula is stout 

 and wide, but flat. The cervical vertebras are more than twelve 

 in number, which is the normal number in all other Raptores, and in 

 all the Insessores. Their habits, when not satisfying the cravings 

 of their appetite, are sluggish and indolent, their attitude slouching, 

 and they are cowardly and timid, but not shy of man. Their dis- 

 gusting though viseful habits render them an object of loathing, 

 which their general appearance and foul smell are alone sufficient 

 to create. But their great, apparently indispensable, usefulness in 

 tropical countries, should divest them of some of these attributes in 

 the mind of the thinking traveller; and their picturesque aspect when 

 high aloft in the air, wheeling in great circles, and also perched on 

 some magnificent mural precipice, add not a little to the characteris- 

 tic scenery of tropical countries. As is well known, they devour 

 the carcases of dead animals and other offensive matter, which 

 would otherwise in the hot regions of the world tend to increase the 

 predisposition to disease. They discover their proper food almost 

 entirely by sight, which is indeed most wonderfully keen. I have 

 known a small piece of fresh meat, a fore-quarter of a miserable 

 sheep, exposed in the open, bare plain, where the eye barely discover- 

 ed a fcAv floating specks in the air high above, and in less than half 

 an hour there would be a number of vultures feeding on it. It is 

 out of the question that smell can have any thing to do with 

 this, and we know from many familiar experiments that vultures 

 will discover and descend on a stuffed carcase of an animal, whilst 

 they will neglect one well hidden, though putrid and offensive. 

 But I do not mean to assert that their sense of sight is illimitable, 

 and in the cases in which I have myself experimented, I do not 

 mean to imply that the very distant birds, that looked like specks, 



