LONGEVITY OF BIRDS. 187 
flight to the same regions—often to the same district, which they 
previously inhabited, and there are good grounds to believe that 
the same pair frequently find their way year after year to the same 
nest. 
The duration of the life of birds in a state of nature is one of those 
subjects on which little is known. Some ancient authors—Hesiod 
and Pliny for example—give to the crow nine times the length of 
life allotted to man, and to the raven three times that period ; in other 
words, the crow, according to these authors, attains to 720 years, 
and the raven 240. The swan, on the same authority, lives 200 years. 
This longevity is doubtful. Parrots, however, are known to have 
reached more than a hundred years. Goldfinches, chaffinches, and 
nightingales unquestionably, even in the confinement of a cage, 
have lived four-and-twenty. Girardin tells us a heron lived fifty-two 
years, which was testified by the ring which he bore on one of his 
legs, and even then he lost his life by an accident, while in full vigour. 
A couple of storks, moreover, have been known to nestle in the same 
place for more than forty years. All that we can affirm is that Birds 
live much longer than the Mammalia. 
We can easily fix a circumscribed geographical boundary to any 
species of Mammalia. They may be limited to a country, or even 
a district. Can we impose a like boundary on Birds? At first sight 
this seems difficult: their powerful organs of locomotion permit of 
their travelling rapidly; and, moreover, their nature, essentially 
mobile, and their wandering humour, lead them to continual change; 
and then their organisation adapts them for great extremes of tem- 
perature—circumstances which would lead us to consider them quite 
cosmopolite. Nevertheless, many species reside habitually in coun- 
tries of very limited range. A sovereign hand has traced on the 
surface of the globe limits that cannot be passed. How such dimi- 
nutive creatures are able to perform such distant journeys, has always 
been a matter of surprise. How can the quail, for instance, with 
its short wing and plump body, traverse the Mediterranean twice in 
the year? Hasselquist tells us that small short-winged birds fre- 
quently came on board his ship in squally weather, all the way from 
the Channel to the Levant; and Prince Charles Bonaparte was 
agreeably surprised by the visit of a party of swallows to the ship 
Delaware, in which he was a passenger, when 500 miles from the 
coast of Portugal, and 400 from Africa. Audubon relates a similar 
occurrence ; and numerous instances are recorded in which these 
migratory birds have taken shelter in the first vessel they met, some- 
times so weak as to be hardly able to move a wing. It is therefore 
