larks, with dislocated vertebrae when they fall
into the large vertical net which is used in
France by twilight sportsmen.

Perhaps, after all we have said and seen,
the sense of touch is the most perfect in
birds, and the organs of feeling are
endowed with a subtilty of perception more
exquisite even than those of sight. In fact,
air being the most variable and unstable of
elements, birds would be endowed by nature
with the gift of universal sensibility, enabling
them to appreciate and foretell the slightest
perturbations of the medium they inhabit. In
consequence, the feathered race are armed
with a nervous impressionability which
comprises the different properties of the
hygrometer, the thermometer, the barometer, and
the electroscope. A tempest which takes the
man of science by surprise, has, long before,
given warning to the birds of the sea. The
noddies, cormorants, gulls, and petrels, know
twenty-four hours beforehand, by means
of the magnetic telegraph which exists
within them, the exact day and moment
when ocean is going into one of his great
rages, opening wide his green abysses, and
flinging the angry foam of his waves in insult
against the forehead of the cliffs. Some birds
are the harbingers of wintry storms; others
usher in the advent of spring. The raven and
the nightingale announce the coming of the
tempest by a peculiar form of bird's expression,
which they both seem to have borrowed from
the vocabulary of the frog — a pre-eminently
nervous animal, to whom the science of
galvanism is greatly indebted. The chaffinch,
in unsettled weather, recommends the
traveller to take his umbrella, and advises
the housekeeper not to be in a hurry
to hang out her linen. Certain mystic
geniuses have attributed this faculty of
divination possessed by birds, to some special
sensibility, acquainting them with the action of
the electric currents that traverse the
atmosphere, and accurately informing them of
their direction. Nor is there any scientific
argument which can be confidently opposed
to such a theory.

After the organs of sight and touch, the
sense of hearing comes next in importance.
The delicacy of the auditory powers of birds
is sufficiently apparent from the passion for
vocal music, which many of them manifest.
It is an universally admitted physical law
that, in all animals, a close and invariable
correspondence exists between the organs of
voice and those of hearing. Now, birds, it will
be seen, are the Stentors of nature. The bull,
who is an enormous quadruped, endowed
with an immensely capacious chest, does not
roar louder than the bittern: a moderate
sized bird which frequents our ponds. In
Lorraine, they style him the boeuf d'eau, or
'' water-bull." A crane, trumpeting two or
three thousand yards above the surface of
the earth, pulls your head back just as
violently as a friend who asks you, " How do
you do? " from the balcony of a fifth-floor
window: while the thundering Mirabeau,
who should venture to harangue the Parisian
populace from the top of the towers of Notre
Dame, would run a great risk of not being
able to convey a single word to a single
member of his congregation.

Ascend in the air, by means of a balloon,
in company with an old Atlas lion, whose
formidable roaring once struck terror
throughout Algerian wildernesses; and, when
you have risen only half a mile, make
your travelling companion give utterance to
the most sonorous of his fine chest-notes.
Those notes will spend themselves in empty
space, without descending so low as the earth.
But the royal kite, floating another half-mile
above you, will not let you lose a single
inflexion of his cat-like mewings, miniatures
though they be of the lion's roar. It is
probable, says M. Toussenel—M. Toussenel is
always speaking, through our humble
interpretation—that nature has expended more
genius in the construction of the larynx of a
wren or a nightingale, than in fabricating the
ruder throats of all the quadrupeds put together.

Smell and taste are but feeble in birds;
and they have no great occasion for either
sense. A bird's appetite must be enormous,
in order to supply the animal heat necessary
for the maintenance of its superior nature.
A bird is a locomotive of the very first
rank—a high-pressure engine, which burns
more fuel than three or four ordinary
machines. " Animals feed; man eats," says
worthy Brillat Savarin. "Clever men alone
know how to eat properly." This strictly
true gastrosophic aphorism is more exactly
applicable to birds than to quadrupeds. Birds
feed, to assuage their hunger and to amuse
themselves; not to indulge in epicurism.
They fatten through sheer ennui, and for
pastime's sake, rather than through any
ambition of "cutting up fat." The task,
moreover, assigned to them, is to destroy the
innumerable seeds of weeds [which they do
in a larger proportion than the protected
seeds of human food], and animal and
insect vermin, which would soon annihilate
the labours of man, did not certain species of
birds feel an incessant craving to devour
them. Birds have no nose, for the same good
reason that they have no palate. It is not
necessary that creatures, destined to eat
everything without making wry faces, should
have, posted in front of their stomach, as we
have, a vigilant sentinel who is troublesomely
cautious who and what he allows to enter the
fortress. All, therefore, that has been said
about the fine scent of the crow and the
vulture, who snuff gunpowder and corpses
at incredible distances, is simply absurd.
There is an excellent reason why crows should
not smell gunpowder; namely, that
gunpowder is scentless, until it is burnt. (We
venture to doubt this statement of fact: having