MIGRATION. 285 



" swallows are often dragged up by fishermen in 

 the form of clustered masses, mouth to mouth, wing 

 to wing, and foot to foot, these having at the be- 

 ginning of autumn collected among the reeds pre- 

 vious to submersion." Pennant shrewdly remarks 

 that " the good archbishop did not want credulity ;" 

 for, " after having stocked the bottoms of lakes 

 with birds, he stores the clouds with mice, which 

 sometimes fall in plentiful showers in Norway and 

 the neighbouring countries." 



Etmuller, professor of Botany and Anatomy at 

 Leipsic, a century after Olaus, gives his personal 

 testimony to the circumstance. "I remember," 

 he says, " to have found more than a bushel meas- 

 ure (medimnus) would hold of swallows closely clus- 

 tered among the reeds of a fishpond under the ice, 

 all of them to appearance dead, but the heart still 

 pulsating." 



Linnaeus, taking the matter as proved, expressly 

 says that " the chimney-swallow (Hirundo rustica), 

 together with the window-swallow (H. urUca), de- 

 merges, and in spring emerges ;" and we find from 

 the dissertations read before the Academy of Upsal, 

 that the submersion of swallows was received in 

 Sweden as an acknowledged fact. The late Peter 

 Collinson, in his correspondence with Linnaeus, 

 " repeatedly urged him to bring the matter to a de- 

 cisive issue by proposing some questions, and point- 

 ing out an easy method of having them answered. 

 As Linnaeus did not take any notice of these ques- 

 tions for a long while, although he was strongly 

 called upon at different times by his acute corre- 

 spondent, we may fairly infer that he was unable to 

 give any satisfactory answer ; and his constant eva- 

 sion of the experimental proofs is an indication of 

 his being unprepared to support what he had as- 

 serted by anything more than the common author- 

 ities "* 



* Reeves on Torpidity, p. 4? 



