Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/614

Rh all outside interference, and I have been told by those who have watched for the purpose that they never rise to the top of the tower with any substance what- ever. They are disqualified by the form of their weak, little curved, unretractile talons from seizing or carrying away living prey.

These birds lay two eggs at a time, and are said to produce but once a year. Like the American eagle, they build their nests in inaccessible rocks and places remote from the hands of man. These jackals of the air are large in size and have remarkably keen sight. They have naked heads and necks, a broad, powerful, hooked bill, and strong, thick legs. They are gregarious, slow in flight, gluttonous of habit, and prefer carrion to living prey.

In view of the fact that the corpses of all Parsees, regardless of the cause of death, even of the most contagious fever, smallpox, Bombay plague, or cholera, are thus exposed in the towers, it is remarkable that these vultures have never been known, so far as investigation can determine, to spread the contagion or suffer from it themselves. When all is over they come to the top of the towers, where they sit for hours without moving. There is nothing of a sacred character ascribed to the birds which admirably perform this disgusting though useful work in the economy of nature. The fact is that there is no unpleasant taint of this charnel-house in the grounds about the towers, there being not the faintest odor of death to mingle with the perfume of the flowers blooming in this beautiful garden.

Europeans may regard the Parsee sys- tem as barbarous and repugnant to civ- ilized ideas. The Parsees are quite as much justified in so regarding our sys- tem of sepulture. The undoubted fact remains that from the sanitary aspect the Parsee system is infinitely the better of the two. True, we do not like to think of the vultures hovering around the funeral procession for the last few miles, or of others awaiting it, perched on, and greedily gazing down into, the tower. Their system is at all events the more perfect solution of the sanitary side of the question, especially in this hot and moist tropical climate. Death is a solemn reminder of the equality of all men before the law of nature, and their mode is an efficient preventive to post-human distinction, vanities and funeral pomp.

ROM the earliest intercourse of the United States with China, the relations between our two countries have been of the friendliest character. When the governments of Europe in the past century, singly or in combination, took aggressive action against China, the United States always refrained from acting with them or following their example. But especially since the days when your distinguished citizen, Anson Burlingame, after having represented the government of the United States at the court of Peking, served so ably as the ambassador of the Imperial Chinese government in making a series of treaties with