214 



The late Herr Gatke (to whom naturalists are 

 indebted for much invaluable information) as an 

 observer on the island of Heligoland, over which the 

 migratory hosts pour like a torrent, speaks of " square 

 miles of birds, as a dense snow-storm driven by a 

 light breeze." This too, for many days in succession. 



Before the theory of migration became an accepted 

 fact — and that is little more than a century ago, — 

 many were the conjectures of naturalists to account 

 for the disappearance of those harbingers of the spring, 

 the Swallows. Some of these, in the light of present- 

 day information, seem not a little ludicrous, yet they 

 were undoubtedly founded on certain habits of the 

 bird — habits imperfectly understood, however, and 

 often embellished by the aid of a lively imagination. 



Aristotle and Pliny believed that Swallows 

 wintered in the hollows of rocks, and during that 

 period lost their feathers. The former part of this 

 opinion was adopted, later, by many learned men. 



Olaus Magnus, Archbishop ofUpsala, was the first 

 to suggest that they passed the winter at the bottom of 

 the Northern lakes, immersed under the ice, or lodged 

 beneath the waters of the sea, at the foot of rocks. 

 He gravely informs us that these birds creep down the 

 reeds, in the autumn, to their subaqueous retreats, 

 and that in the aforesaid lakes clustered masses of 

 them, mouth to mouth, wing to wing, and foot to foot, 

 are often found by the fishermen, who, on discovering 

 such a mass, throw it into the water again. That the 

 good Archbishop did not lack credulity, is apparent 

 from the fact that, having stocked the bottoms of the 

 lakes with birds, he stored the clouds with mice, 

 which, he declared, sometimes fell in plentiful 

 showers on Norway and the surrounding countries ! 



Incredible though it may seem, some good 

 observers in our own countrv were firm believers in 



