110 
QUAILS. 
digious 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 
oyer 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. Another traveller * tell 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 traveller t, a 
foreigner, whose words we will therefore translate. 
There is, says he, a small island off the coast of 
Egypt, where these birds usually alight in the 
Autumn, on which they are taken in such quantities, 
that, after having been stripped of their feathers, 
and dried in the burning sands for about a quarter 
of an hour, they are worth but one penny a pound. 
The crews of those vessels, which in that season 
lie in the adjacent harbour, have no other food 
allowed them. The object of the Israelites, there- 
fore, in spreading them round the camp, was to 
dry them : a mode of preparing fish and camels' 
flesh, still practised by the Arabs in the very same 
country. 
The only difficulty seems to be in their being so 
* Madden , vol. ii. t Maillet. 
