It remains at present undecided whether the Bearded Vultures found throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa are to be regarded as different, or merely as varieties of the same species. Of these the European is the largest, being, according to Tschudi, from four to four and a half feet long and nine and a half broad. The tail measures twenty-one inches. The female is generally larger than her mate. The different species, if such they be, vary somewhat in the coloration of their plumage. The Bearded Vulture, or Lämmergeier (Lamb Vulture), of the Swiss Alps inhabits all the lofty mountain ranges of Europe, Asia, and Africa, living usually in pairs, or alone, and but rarely appearing in parties of more than five. The flight of this truly formidable bird will bear comparison with that of many Falcons, and its powers of enduring fatigue are very considerable. Upon the ground it steps somewhat after the manner of the Raven, but with much less ease and nimbleness. Most wonderful tales have been told of the _Ossifragra_ (Bone-breaker), as the Bearded Vulture was called by the ancients, from the fact that its favourite method of despatching its victims is by precipitating them from lofty cliffs, in order that the carcase may be shattered by the fall. Gesner, who wrote about the fifteenth century, assures his readers that the eyrie of a Lämmergeier, found in Germany, "was placed upon three oaks, and was constructed of branches and other materials, so widely extended that a wagon could have been sheltered under it. In this nest were three young birds, already so large as to measure three ells in the spread of their wings. Their legs were thicker than those of a lion, and their claws as the fingers of a man." We smile at such exaggerations as these; there is no doubt, however, that these birds are by far the most dangerous and rapacious of the many feathered tyrants by which mountain ranges are infested. In 1819 so numerous did they become in Saxe Gotha that, after two children had been carried off by them, a price was set upon their heads. They destroy sheep, hares, she-goats, chamois, and calves, in large numbers, and hold even man himself in so little dread that he would be foolhardy indeed who should venture to molest them during the breeding season. From Simpson we learn that marrow-bones constitute the tid-bits of these feathered monsters, and that no sooner is the flesh stripped away than they either swallow the bones entire or dash them to pieces by dropping them upon a piece of rock. They will also devour tortoises, and the writer from whom we quote suggests that it was probably a Lämmergeier that made the unfortunate mistake of endeavouring to break the hard covering of one of these creatures by letting it fall upon the head of the poet Æschylus, imagining that worthy ancient's bald pate to be a stone.