THE QUAIL. 
141 
and saw some fishing-boats come in with ten or a dozen sharks on board. These 
were opened in his presence, and each one contained from eight to a dozen Quails. 
There is, of course, a general shooting-match, which lasts two or three days, on 
the coast wherever they arrive. 
Colonel Sykes states that the Common Quail is the identical species which 
was furnished to the Israelites in the wilderness. The word used in the original 
o 
Hebrew for Quail is the same as that by which the bird is now known to the 
Arabians. The manner in which these Quails arrived and fell, as it were 
exhausted, on reaching the Israelites’ encampment, is viewed by him as showing 
that although the birds were given miraculously (being promised before they came), 
still that they arrived in the same manner as they always arrive when on their 
ordinary migrations. He remarks further from this upon the perpetuation of an 
instinct (migratory) through upwards of 3,300 years. 
Bishop Mant has some pretty lines on the arrival of the Quails and the 
persecution to which they are immediately subjected. After speaking of the mottled 
crake, and the way its delusive call leads on the searcher for it from place to 
place, he adds— 
“ Less likely of your aim to fail 
If with loud call the whistling Quail 
Attract you, ’mid the bladed wheat 
To spread the skilful snare, and cheat 
With mimic sounds his amorous ear, 
Intent the female’s cry to hear. 
For now the vernal warmth invites 
From Afric’s coasts their northward flights, 
And prompts to skim on nightly breeze 
Sicilian or Biscayan seas.” 
The reader will notice here how true to fact is the expression, “skimming on nightly 
breeze.” 
Temminck says, in mentioning the enormous numbers of Quails which migrate, 
that 100,000 of them have been taken near Nettuno in one day. Canon Tristram, 
too, observed enormous flights of Quails on the north coast of Algeria in two 
successive years. They came from the south during the night, and were on the 
plains in such numbers at daybreak that scores of sportsmen had only to shoot 
as fast as they could reload. There has been some discussion as to the meaning 
of “ mother Quail ” in the passage of Pliny cited above, and also named by other 
authorities. It is generally regarded as meaning simply a larger or fatter Quail 
than its kindred ; but the name has been assigned by some to the landrail (Crex 
