8 THE MIGRATIONS OF BIRDS 



refers to migration except casual mention of species 

 of birds that we know to be migratory. Matthew 

 Paris, monk of St. Albans, in a manuscript pre- 

 served at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the 

 year 1251 wrote of an invasion of crossbills, and 

 referred to them as birds never before seen in Eng- 

 land. Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, des- 

 cribed the field-fare, a species of thrush, as "frosty," 

 in allusion to its presence in England only during 

 winter. 



Glaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala, in 1555 

 speaks of the flights of swallows, Francis Willoughby 

 in his Ornithology published in 1678, mentions vari- 

 ous migratory birds; and the writings of Gilbert 

 White, Thomas Pennant, and George Edwards in 

 the succeeding century carry much of interest on 

 this subject. These men in fact kept regular records 

 of arrival and departure. The observations of George 

 Edwards on the migration of birds were collected in 

 his Essays upon Natural History^ published in Lon- 

 don in 1770; while in 1780 appeared a Discourse on 

 the Emigration of British Birds, printed anony- 

 mously, but since attributed to John Legg, a nat- 

 uralist previously unknown. 



From the beginning of the nineteenth century 

 records of arrival and departure of migratory birds 

 were gathered by many observant naturalists in the 

 northern hemisphere, and the mass of data increased 

 in bulk yearly. 



