524 THE COMMON CUCKOO. 



the cruel fables attendant upon creeds and priestcraft. Yet it 

 is not very long since some reputed naturalists maintained that 

 not only cuckoos but swallows hybernated and passed the 

 winter under water amongst mud, as the following paragraph in 

 the Scotsman of March 28th, 1884, shows : — " Kelso. — 

 Interesting to Naturalists. — Thursday last two swallows were 

 seen skimming the surface of the Tweed, near Rosebank Toll. 

 They have not been seen since, but their appearance a month 

 earlier than usual favours the hybernation theory, which has 

 now many supporters in the Kelso district /" and the Daily News 

 quite recently said, " A Cornish myth relates with all gravity 

 that a cuckoo which retired into a hollow log was roused from 

 its winter sleep when the wood was thrown on the fire, and 

 astonished the company by its sudden cry." At one time the 

 fables connected with natural history were as rigidly believed as 

 the miraculous tales of what is called religion. But how men 

 can still believe that swallows dive to the bottom of a pond or 

 a river to escape the rigour of winter, and remain eight months 

 in the year without breathing — feathers not only preserved, but 

 renewed by moulting — is almost as bad as belief in miraculous 

 creeds. It is not very long since people implicitly believed 

 that the bernicle goose {Anas Erythropus) was hatched from 

 the small barnacle shell, Lepas Anatifera, seen sticking upon 

 rotten wood cast up from the sea. In " Sibbald's History of 

 Fife," published at Cupar in 1803, the editor gives two 

 instances where both of the writers declared they were eye- 

 witnesses of the transformation. Thus (with the spelling 

 modernised), " Boeth Cosmographie," chap. XIV., says : — 



''Some men believe that the claik geese grow on trees by the nebbs, but 

 their opinion is vain ; and, as the nature and procreation of the.se claiks are 

 strange, we have made no little labour and diligence to search the truth 

 and verity thereof ; we have sailed the seas where they are bred, and find by 

 great experience that the sea is more the cause of their procreation than any 

 other thing. For all trees cast into the sea by time become worm-eaten, 

 and in the small holes and bores thereof grow small worms. First, they 

 show their head and feet, and last they show their plumes and wings. 

 Finally, when they come to size and quantity of geese, they fly in the air 

 as other birds do, as was proved in the year of God 14-90 in sight of many 

 people near the castle of Petslego, where a great tree was brought by the 

 sea to land. The laird got this wonderful tree divided by the saw, when a 

 multitude of worms appeared thrawing themselves out of the holes and 

 bores of the tree. Some were rude, as if but new shaped ; some had baith 

 head, feet, and wings, but nae feathers. Some were perfectly shaped fowls. 

 At last the people, having the tree more admired each day, brocht it to the 

 Kirk <>' Sanct Androis, where it remains yet to our clays. And two years 

 after this another sic like tree came into the Firth of Tay, beside Dundee, 

 worm eaten and holes full of young geese in the same manner. A few years 

 after this, in the port of Leith, beside Edinburgh, anither s,ic like tree case 



