Sight in Savages. 195 
to all of us alike it presented no definite form, but 
was merely something dark, standing against a 
hoary background of tall grass-plumes. Our guides, 
principally regarding its size, at once guessed it to be 
an animal which they no doubt expected to find in that 
place—namely, a wild horse. The other, who did 
not have that training of the eye and mind for 
distant objects in the desert which is like an in- 
stinct, and, like instinct, is liable to mistakes, and 
who carefully studied its appearance for himself, 
pronounced it to be a dark bush. When we got 
near it turned out to be a clump of tall bulrushes, 
growing in a place where they had no business to 
grow, and burnt by drought and frosts to so dark a 
brown that at a distance they seemed quite black. 
In the following case the savage was right. I 
pointed out an object, dark, far off, so low down as 
to be just visible above the tall grasses, passing with 
a falling and rising motion like that of a horseman 
going at aswinging gallop. “There goes a mounted 
man,” I remarked. ‘‘ No—a traru,” returned my 
companion, after one swift glance; the traru being 
a large, black, eagle-like bird of the plains, the 
carancho of the whites—Polyborus tharus. But the 
object was not necessarily more distinct to him than 
to me; he could not see wings and beak at that dis- 
tance ; but the trart was a familiar object, which 
he was accustomed to see at all distances—a figure 
in the landscape which he looked for and expected 
to find. It was only a dark blot onghe horizon ; but 
he knew the animal’s habits and appearance, and 
