The discussion as to the precise nature of the sense
which brought the male tiger-moths to the gauze cage of the female tiger-moth, and which brings the vultures from all quarters to a dead carcass, was continued in Monday's Times by Dr. Bree, who maintains that it must be smell, because the moths will only find out the presence of a female to windward of them and not of one to leeward; and that vultures often miss a carcass in which decomposition has not begune—a fact for which he quotes the eminent naturalist Charles Waterton,—but never one in which decay is already at work. This last assertion, however, Mr. Fitzjames Stephen disproves in Thursday's Pall Mall, showing by his own experi- ence in India that vultures do collect in large numbers even before the dying creature which is to be their prey is actually dead, and he accounts for it by the sense of sight, holding that the vultures patrol the heavens at a great height, and that when one sees a possible dinner and swoops down upon it, the others are guided by his change of movement, which from their height in the air they can always detect. But surely neither smell nor sight will explain the unerring line of flight of the migrating swallows or other birds ? Nor is either Mr. Stephen's or Dr. Bree's explanation sufficient to account for the instinct by which a cat or dog finds its way straight home for forty miles or more over a completely unknown country, Mr. Stephen's explanation being obviously inapplicable, and Dr. Bree's, who sticks to it that it is by smell, being open to the criticism that, if that be the true explanation, such a feat clearly could never be achieved when the lost home is to leeward of the animal who makes the journey. There is evidently still a secret beyond the scope of all these explanations.
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