284 FACULTIES OF BIRDS. 
which they got through without any difficulty, and 
lived three or four years, regularly moulting every 
year at the usual time. On the renewal of their 
feathers, it appeared that their tails were forked ex- 
actly the same as in those birds which return hither 
in the spring, and in every respect their appearance 
was the same.”* 
The story of bank-swallows having been drawn 
from their holes on the Rhine, it may be observed, 
is dated in April, which is about the usual time of 
the appearance of those birds, and is no more ex- 
traordinary than it would be to find a sparrow un- 
der a house-eave, or a tomtit in the hole of a tree, 
Did the bank-swallows really remain torpid in those 
holes during the winter, nothing would be easier 
than to find them there; a circumstance which we 
believe has never been recorded even in the annals 
of credulity. In a numerous colony of this spe- 
cies, established in the bank of a stone-quarry at 
Catrine, in Ayreshire, we have in numerous in- 
stances witnessed the opening of the nestholes in 
the operations of quarrying, and never knew or 
heard of a swallow being found there either torpid 
or otherwise. 
But however untenable the opinion may be that 
swallows and cuckoos become torpid in winter, it 
appears rational, when compared with the notion 
that has been gravely supported of their going un- 
der water to undergo their winter’s sleep; a notion 
which we should not have brought under review 
were it not that it still seems to linger in the fan- 
cies of some, from the authority of the names of 
those by whom it has been adopted. The earliest 
statement of this notion which we have been able 
to trace is given by Olaus Magnus, archbishop of 
Upsal, in Sweden, published in 1555. 
“ From the northern waters,” says the archbishop, 
* British Birds, i., 324, 
