832 The Power of Scent in the Turkey Vulture. (August, 
That any animal with eyes, especially bird’s eyes, should not 
use them in connection with its other senses is undeniable, yet to 
say that the vulture is gifted with a strength of vision extraordi- 
nary as its powers of smelling is very open to dispute. 
By analogy we may reason that as no member of the bird- 
world is preéminently blessed in more than one of its senses, as 
hawks, eagles, and owls by seeing, having wonderfully developed 
eyes, or the ducks, sandpipers, and curlews by feeling, having 
wonderfully sensitive and discriminating mandibles, why not then 
restrict the vulture, whose development of nostrils is enormous 
compared with that of its other organs of sense to smell. The 
conclusion of Gosse just given, t. 2. that “ the sense of sight” in 
finding “the piece of offal” was “ unassisted by that of smelling” 
because “the meat was too recent to communicate any taint to 
the morning air, and the vulture stooped to it from a very far dis- 
tance,” is too hasty, especially the part I have italicized. It looks 
as if he thought the “ distance ” would exclude the possibility of 
the bird having scented the flesh so far, and this, too, in the face 
of his previous argument that its unassisted power of scent was 
so wonderful at like distances. 
How do we know either that the offal was too fresh to taint the 
morning atmosphere? Rather than this would it not be fairer to 
conclude, after such proof of the extreme sensitiveness of the 
vulturine olfactory, that the scent of newly-slaughtered flesh, 
however imperceptible to the human nose, is as easily detected by 
these accomplished scavengers as we men would discover our 
proximity to some offensive carcass ? 
That vultures seek and devour newly killed and even living 
animals is well established, notwithstanding the experiments of 
Waterton on the turkey buzzards of Demerara, in which he not 
only noticed they never attacked the numerous reptiles in their 
easy reach, but “ he even killed lizards and frogs and put them in 
their way, but they did not appear to notice them until they at- 
tained the putrid scent.” 
Experiments with wild animals are unreliable meth 
termining the value of hypotheses. To thus beg the questi 
nature is unnatural, and such methods of inquiry are ™& 
“ given the lie.” ’Tis too much like torture for a confess! 
an entreaty for the true responses of nature’s oracle- Audubon 
overlooked this truth when the fact of some confined vu 
ods of de- 
ono 
ion than 
ltures n - 
