Among the curiosities which are scattered by the liberal hand of nature even over these deserts may be enumerated certain beautiful flints and pebbles, which are superior to Florentine marble, and, in many instances, equal to the Mokha stone, in the variety of their figures and representations. Locusts, hornets, and vipers were numerous; and the lizards seem to have considerably amused the loitering members of the caravan by their active movements and spotted skins. Of birds the only ones seen by Shaw were the percnopterus and the dove, as the graceful and beautiful antelope was the only animal; but the ostrich, which he seems to consider neither a bird nor a beast, is the grand ranger, says he, and ubiquitarian of the deserts, from the Atlantic Ocean to the very utmost skirts of Arabia, and perhaps far beyond it to the east. Of the white hares, like those found in the Alps and other cold regions, which some travellers have observed in this peninsula, Dr. Shaw saw no specimen; neither did he meet with any badgers, though, from the frequent mention made of their skins in Exodus, this animal must formerly have abounded here. Nothing, however, seems to have kindled up a poetical fervour in the mind of our traveller like the ostrich, and the magnificent description of its nature and peculiarities which occurs in the book of Job. “When these birds,” he observes, “are surprised by coming suddenly upon them, while they are feeding in some valley, or behind some rocky or sandy eminence in the desert, they will not stay to be curiously viewed and examined. They afford an opportunity only of admiring at a distance the extraordinary agility and the stateliness likewise of their motions, the richness of their plumage, and the great propriety there was of ascribing to them ‘an expanded, quivering wing.’ Nothing certainly can be more beautiful and entertaining than such a sight! the wings, by their repeated though unwearied vibrations, equally serving them for sails and oars; while their feet, no less assisting in conveying them out of sight, are no less insensible of fatigue.”