Page:Natural History, Birds.djvu/26

Rh Roc, of the Arabian nights, "who, as authors report, is able to trusse an elephant." It is not surprising that this bird, seen in the wildest and most magnificent scenes, far above ordinary objects of comparison, should have drawn upon the imaginations of those who observed it. Nestling in the most solitary places, often upon the ridges



of rocks which border the lower limits of perpetual snow, and crowned with its extraordinary comb, the Condor, for a long time, appeared to the eyes of the scientific Humboldt, as a winged giant, and he declares that it was not until he had actually measured a dead specimen, that the optical illusion was corrected. Still it is an immense