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 flights 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 flights 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 
t Slade’s Travels in Turkey, vol. i. 
t Madden, vol. ii. 
Bishop Patrick. 
