198 HYBERNAT10N OF SWALLOWS. 



jecting pieces of wood which the railway men have fastened up 

 to secure the establishments of their little confiding friends. 

 Notwithstanding the bustle and noise that precedes and follows 

 the stopping of a train, the birds fly backwards and forwards to 

 their young broods without the least hesitation ; stopping only 

 while the trains are at rest at the station, during which time the 

 bright-eyed, white-throated little fellows look out of their door- 

 ways and very composedly survey what is going forward. 



In the four charming letters devoted to the Swallow tribe in 

 White's " Selborne," the manners of these engaging birds are 

 described with a fulness and minute particularity of detail which 

 has left little or nothing for subsequent observers to record, as it 

 gives them little or nothing to correct. On one point, it is true, 

 the historian of Selborne gives his coimteuance to a fallacy re- 

 specting these birds which finds but few supporters at the pre- 

 sent day : we allude, of course, to the opinion once commonly 

 entertained that, at the approach of winter, the Swallows retire, 

 not to the warmer regions of the south, as is now known to be 

 the case, but to the bottom of ponds and streams, there to remain, 

 buried in the mud, in a state of torpidity until the return of 

 spring. 



The aecounts which have from time to time been given of the 

 discovery of Swallows in a state of torpidity, in caves and hollow 

 trees, and such like places, are for the most part of the same 

 apocryphal character as the stories already noticed of showers oj 

 Frogs, and Toads embedded in the solid rocks, and are entitled 

 to about the same amount of credit. 



Some of the most striking cases on record are those mentioned 

 by Bishop Stanley in his " History of Birds ;" but they are in no 

 respect more explicit and reliable than Old Gerard's or Sir Robert 

 Murray's personal testimony to the Goose-bearing qualities of 

 the Barnacle-tree, or to the authorities that could be cited for a 

 dozen other popular delusions of the same character, which are 

 now altogether exploded. 



One of the most amusing of these stories of hybernating Swal- 

 lows is that told by Derham in his Physico-Theology, in which 

 " an ancient fisherman, accounted an honest man," is represented 

 as having discovered at a very low ebb of the tide on the coast of 

 Cornwall, a great number of Swallows and Swifts hanging by 

 their feet to one another, and adhering to the rocks, " where 



