FABLE AND FOLKLORE 91 



Middle Ages and alluded to by Dryden in his poem The 

 Hind and The Panther, speaking of young swallows in 

 autumn : 



They try their fluttering wings and trust themselves in air, 



But whether upward to the moon they go, 



Or dream the winter out in caves below, 



Or hawk for flies elsewhere, concerns us not to know. 



Southwards, you may be sure, they bent their flight, 



And harbored in a hollow rock by night. 



Or as Gay's shepherd surmises: 8 



He sung where woodcocks in the summer feed, 

 And in what climates they renew their breed; 

 Some think to northern coasts their flight tend, 

 Or to the moon in midnight hours ascend: 

 When swallows in the winter season keep, 

 And how the drowsy bat and dormouse sleep. 



A quaint theological justification of this theory that 

 birds fly to the moon as a winter-resort is to be found in 

 Volume VI of The Harleian Miscellany. It is entitled 

 "An Inquiry into the Physical and Literal Sense of the 

 Scriptures/' and is an exegesis of Jeremiah viii, 7: "The 

 stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed time, and the 

 turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time 

 of their coming. ,, The reverend commentator, whose 

 name is lost, begins at once to explain migration among 

 birds. He first assures his readers that many birds, in- 

 cluding storks, often fly on migration at a height that 

 renders them indiscernible. Now, he argues, if the flight 

 of storks had been in a horizontal direction flocks of 

 birds would have been seen frequently by travellers — 

 ignoring the fact that they are and always have been ob- 

 served. But, he goes on, as the flight is not horizontal it 



