OF SELBORNE. 169 
fallen in any three weeks for these thirty years past 
in that part of the world. A mean quantity in that 
county, for one year, is twenty inches and a half. 
LETTER IX. 
You are, I know, no great friend to migration , 
and the well-attested accounts from various parts 
of the kingdom seem to justify you in your suspi- 
cions, that at least many of the swallow kind do not 
leave us in the winter, but lay themselves up like 
insects and bats, in a torpid state, and slumber away 
the more uncomfortable months, till the return of 
the sun and fine weather awakens them. 
But then we must not, I think, deny migration 
in general, because migration certainly does subsist 
in some places, as my brothér in Andalusia has ful. 
ly informed me. Of the motions of these birds he 
has ocular demonstration, for many weeks together, 
both spring and fall, during which periods myriads 
of the swallow kind traverse the Straits from north 
to south and from south to north, according’ to the 
season. And these vast migrations consist not only 
of hirundines, but of bee-birds, hoopoes, oro pendo- 
Jos, or golden thrushes, &c., &c., and also of many 
of our soft-billed summer birds of passage; and, 
moreover, of birds which never leave us, such as 
all the various sorts of hawks and kites. Old Be- 
lon, two hundred years ago, gives a curious account 
of the incredible armies of hawks and kites which 
he saw in the springtime traversing the Thracian 
Bosphorus from Asia to Europe. Besides the 
r 
