NOTES OF THE MONTH.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 249, 30 March 1875, Page 4

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

(From the Spectator.')

An important work by Captain R. F. Burton, containing a history of Congo and an account of all that is known of the river from the days of Diego Cam to recent times, has been (the Academy says) for upwards of a year in the hands of Mr Tinsley. It will be remembered that Captain Burton visited the Congo in 1863, and ascended the river as far as the Tellala Falls; so that he combines personal knowledge with that fare geographical erudition in which the discoverer of Lake Taganyika has few living rivals. The discussion as to the nature of the instinct which informs vultures of the presence of objects of prey has been continued in the Times by Mr Charles Weld-Blundell and Colonel Stuart-Wortley, and again by Mr Asheton Dilke, and all three correspondents seems to us to have brought very powerful evidence against Mr Waterton’s alleged doctrine, that the sense which attracts the vulture is smell. Mr Weld-Blundell asserts, first, that the nasal organ of the vulture is far less finely organised than his eye; next, that the herdsmen of the Andes breed their cattle from black rather than light-coloured stock, so as to hide their colour from the condors which scour the heavens in search of prey. Again, all these travellers declare, just as Mr Fizjames Stephen has shown, that vultures are attracted even before the death of the creature which is to be their prey, and constantly attracted, says Mr WeldBlundell, in the desert, where the heat is so dry that there is no smell, before it is possible for any kind of decay to have begun. Colonel Stuart-Wortley confirms this evidence completely in every respect by his own experience, and cites his adventures in South Africa to prove that it is by the surprising range of their vision—a range that is far wider than man’s—that vultures are guided to the dying buffalo or its newly dead carcass. It seems probable that the average vulture’s eye is as least as far-sighted as a human eye armed with a telescope, while it commands, of course, a far wider field. The evidence seems also to show that they have quite a surveyor's power of measuring the angle with the horizon at which another vulture is flying, since the flight of a great number is found to converge accurately, without the least deviation, on a single point, though many of them fly from a height too small to admit of their being guided by their own vision,—their course being, therefore, in all probability, directed simply by observation of the angle and line of flight of their more elevated comrades,

Mr Baillie Cochrane has made a speech, which became something of a hymn to Mr Disraeli, at Ryde, in the Isle of Wight. “ Mr Disraeli,” said Mr Cochrane, “ was a perfect sample of a political leader. Those who had studied that great statesman’s character, his life, his conduct, would feel sure that it was not only owing to his wonderful ability, his matchless eloquence, his thorough fervor of mind, that he had achieved his great victory, but it was owing also to the self-command, the resolution, the confidence, the self-re-liance which day by day, year by year, he had shown in leading the party “ ‘ Beneath his banner proud to stand, Were found the noblest of the land.’ ” And Mr Cochrane added that, according to Frederick the Great, an army of hares commanded by a lion would be a much better .army than an army of lions commanded by a hare. Very probably, but who is the lion, and who the hare 1 Was Mr Disraeli the lion when he assured Prince Bismarck that he had not referred to Count Arnim’s case, in saying what had no meaning at all except in reference to Count Arnim ? And how did the “ army of lions ” feel on that occasion ? “ Fervour of mind ” is the last phrase to apply to Mr Disraeli. He has detachment of mind, but no fervour. His fervour is all pinchbeck,—the fervour of “Alroy” and “ Contarini Fleming.” Mr Baillie Cochrane is an enthusiastic disciple, but a wretched critic; and we doubt whether he could even distinguish the lion from the hare, ~-of course, we do not mean zoologically, but morally.