SWALLOW. 169 



driven him from the village, darting down from above 

 on his back, and rising in a perpendicular line in perfect 

 security. This bird will also sound the alarm, and 

 strike at cats when they climb on the roofs of houses, or 

 otherwise approach the nests. 



On one point alone does " good old White," as he has 

 been happily termed, differ from ornithologists of the 

 day. He believed that it was possible that some 

 Swallows might hibernate instead of migrating, and 

 remain in holes in trees or banks in a torpid state, till 

 the spring sun called them, like the insects, to life and 

 activity again. This was indeed a very ancient belief, 

 expressed in the familiar lines 



" The bat, the bee, the butterfly, 



The Cuckoo, and the Swallow, 

 The Corncrake, and the Nightingale, 

 They all sleep in the hollow." 



Even the great Linnaeus seems to have held the same 

 opinion, as also Bishop Stanley and many others. In 

 The Zoologist for 1845, Mr. Holme, of Oxford, writes : 

 " On the hibernation of this species [the House Swallow], 

 I was told many years since by old Wall, then keeper of 

 the Kildare Street Museum, in Dublin, that after a 

 heavy snow in the winter of 1825-26, on going into the 

 Museum to see whether the snow had melted through, 

 he found four Chimney Swallows perched close together 

 on a cross-beam, with their heads under their wings ; 

 but on approaching his hand to them, they flew off, and 

 escaped into the open air." Mr. Gosse, too, holds the 

 opinion " that a few, for some reason or other, evade the 

 task of a southward flight, and remain, becoming torpid, 

 occasionally betrayed into a temporary activity, and 



